The Lake District Murder (British Library Crime Classics) (11 page)

Meredith returned disgruntled to the police station. Although outwardly he had expected no result, subconsciously he had rather hoped that the broken glass
would
supply some startling data. Oh, well—this detection business was full of annoying
cul-de-sacs
. One took a likely road and after a tiring tramp it ended abruptly in a blank wall. Frustration, confound it, was part of his job!

The Sergeant was off duty and Railton
pro tem
in charge of the office.

“That clock right, Constable?” asked Meredith, jerking his thumb at the wall.

“Ten minutes past five—yes, that’s right, sir.”

“Well, I want you to go on point duty until six o’clock. Understand?” Railton looked puzzled.

“Point-duty? Where, sir?”

“At the bottom of the street on Greta Bridge. I’m expecting a Nonock petrol lorry to come through Keswick within the next few minutes. If it does, stop it, and bring the occupants up here. I want to talk to ‘em.”

Railton, secretly disgusted at having to abandon the comfortable heat of the office, put on his helmet and departed.

CHAPTER VIII

PRINCE AND BETTLE EXPLAIN

I
N
ten minutes the constable rapped on the door of the inner office.

“The gentlemen are outside, sir.”

“Show ‘em in,” said Meredith briskly. “And I shall probably want you to take down a statement.”

For all his outward calm, Meredith was experiencing a lively undercurrent of excitement. Although as a practical-minded man he was inclined to scoff at intuition, he could not help feeling that the approaching interview would prove of paramount importance to his investigations. If these men failed to tell him anything then the future of the case stretched out before him with all the uncompromising bleakness of a moorland road.

The moment the bull-necked Mr. Bettle came through the door Meredith appreciated the aptness of Charlie Dawson’s nickname. Brute strength was the keynote of his physical appearance; accruing from a massive torso, a somewhat smallish head and a broad and prominent jowl. Mentally he looked, if not actually deficient, considerably under average quota, whilst the slow roving of his eyes spoke of a nature that was suspicious rather than credulous. Beside this cumbersome giant his companion offered a strange and ludicrous contrast. Well under average height, dapper and nimble of movement, Prince was a Cockney to his finger-tips; embodying in his small, dynamic person all the ready wit and intelligence of the type. In view of the dissimilarity between the two men, Meredith decided, at once, that it would be politic to question them apart.

After they had revealed their names, the Inspector stated his reason for wanting to see them. And although he was watching them closely he was unable to detect the flicker of an eyelid at his first mention of the murder. Bettle looked straight at him with a sort of bewildered stupidity, whilst Prince seemed overwhelmed with an impatient desire to speak. Both men acknowledged that they had seen the report of the inquest in the local paper, also the police demand for information, but as they had only stopped for a short time at the garage, and as Clayton was alive and in a normal frame of mind when they left, they had decided that there was no point in their coming forward.

The Inspector hastened to correct this mistaken viewpoint.

“In a case of this sort any information, however slight, may be of importance. You were the last people to see Clayton alive, so I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me all you can. Any objection?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” replied Prince promptly.

“Same ‘ere,” grunted Bettle.

“Very well. Suppose I take your statements separately? It will make things easier.” Meredith opened the door and called the constable. “The Sergeant back yet?”

“Just come in, sir.”

“Good. Then suppose you sit in the other office for a minute, Mr. Bettle, whilst Mr. Prince and I have a word together in here. All right, Railton. I shall want you. Now, then, Mr. Prince—let’s have the details of your visit to the garage on Saturday night.”

Prince seemed more than ready to oblige. He delivered his evidence with such swift volubility that it was all the constable could do to take down the main points of his statement.

“Well, it’s like this,” began Prince. “Me and my mate work the Keswick–Cockermouth district for the Nonock. We don’t have no half-day off on a Saturday. That’s a rule of the firm. Thursday’s our day, see? Well the last garage on our round is the Derwent. We’d had an order through on Friday to deliver two ‘undred gallons without fail next day. So we pulls up and, after a word or two with Clayton in the office, connects with the tank and delivers as per schedule. I suppose we were the best part of ‘arf an hour on the job, what with one thing and another. Clayton’s a talkative chap—leastways, I suppose I should say he
was
a talkative chap—and we had a bit of an argument about ‘oo was going to win the F.A. Cup this season. At any rate, about ‘arf-past seven, after Clayton had signed the delivery slip, taken a dip of the tank and O.K.’d the load, we left for the depot. He was right as rain
then
, though a bit absent minded, if you take me. I’ve heard he’s a moody chap, Inspector, but whether that’s true or not I can’t rightly say.”

“You didn’t notice anybody hanging about the place when you left?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you certain about the time you started for the depot?”

“Pretty near positive. You see, I ‘appened to look at my watch, because we were already overdue at the depot.”

“Overdue?” said the Inspector sharply. “Why was that?”

“Engine trouble. Spot of water in the carburettor feed, as it turned out. Took us the best part of an hour to set the thing right.”

“Where did this happen?”

“D’you know Jenkin ‘Ill, about ‘arf-way between Hursthole Point and Braithwaite Station? We called on time at the Lothwaite and then ran into this patch of trouble. Consequence was we didn’t arrive at the Derwent until near on seven o’clock.”

“I see. And after you left the Derwent you returned straight to the Penrith depot? No stops, I take it?”

“None. A clear run. Mr. Rose—that’s the manager—was waiting back for us and checked us in.”

Meredith rose from his desk and held out his hand for Railton’s hurriedly written statement.

“Thanks, Mr. Prince. Perhaps you’d just read this through and attach your signature.”

As soon as this had been done, Railton ushered in Bettle, whilst Prince vanished into the outer office.

Bettle was far less glib in the delivery of his evidence. Whenever Meredith slipped in a terse question, the driver pondered deeply, rubbed the back of his head with his cap, and answered with a deliberation that was distinctly irritating. Every one of his slow utterances seemed to have a heavy chain attached to it, and it was all the Inspector could do to drag the necessary information out of Bettle’s dull cranium. But the sum total of his evidence coincided in every detail with that of his mate. They had been overdue because of carburettor trouble. They had stayed for a time at the Derwent arguing with Clayton about the chances of the various football teams, and left for the depot at seven-thirty. Bettle remembered Prince taking out his watch and looking at it. His mate, in fact, had mentioned the time and suggested that they ought to get a move on. They had had a straight run home and Mr. Rose had checked them into the depot.

When Bettle had laboriously read through his deposition and attached an ill-written signature, Meredith explained that there was nothing more he wished to see them about, and the men hurried out into the street and climbed into their lorry.

In a second Meredith was back at his desk. Opening a drawer, he took out a Bartholomew’s mile-to-the-inch map of the district and began to scale the exact distance between the Derwent and the Nonock depot. His final reckoning was exactly nineteen and a half miles. Assuming that the tank was more or less empty, Meredith concluded that the lorry could have covered the distance in an hour or a little over. At the most, it could not have taken longer than an hour and twenty minutes. Suppose, therefore, he compromised and said an hour and ten minutes—that would mean Rose had checked in the lorry at eight-forty. One of his next moves was to get a glimpse of the manager’s books without Rose’s knowledge. How the devil he was to manage that Meredith could not imagine. He would have to think out a scheme.

And beyond this matter of times, what exactly had he gained from the interview? Little enough! The promise of his intuition had not been fulfilled. The men had put foward a perfectly feasible explanation for their belated arrival at the Derwent. It was raining. What more natural than a spot of water in the petrol feed-pipe? He ought to check up on their statement and find out if anybody had noticed the lorry parked on the roadside between Hursthole Point and Braithwaite Station. Their last call had been at the Lothwaite. He could easily check up there with the proprietor the time of the lorry’s departure. He could, in fact, kill two birds with one stone. He had already decided to have a look over the lakeside garage in consequence of the Superintendent’s story about the Hursthole Point tragedy. Was it, he wondered, in any way suggestive that the lorry formed a link between the two fateful garages? Possible but not probable, was Meredith’s inward comment.

He then turned his attention to the other half of the lorry’s journey. Surely he could find somebody who had noticed it either on the open road or passing through Keswick? They might not know the exact time they had seen it, but a rough idea would be enough to gauge the truth of the men’s story.

Suddenly the Inspector whistled. Why the devil hadn’t he thought of it before? He knew somebody who could give him the desired information! Hadn’t Freddie Hogg been cycling home from Keswick at a time when the lorry should have been on its way to the depot? Freddie had passed Clayton at the garage at about seven-thirty-five. The lorry had left the garage at seven-thirty. So Freddie must have met the lorry on the road somewhere just outside Portinscale.

Burning with impatience, Meredith searched through the telephone directory. Yes—there it was—Hare and Hounds, Braithwaite. Briskly he dialled exchange and in a few seconds he was through to the public house.

Freddie Hogg himself answered the phone.

“Look here, Mr. Hogg,” said Meredith after he had revealed himself, “I’ve got a question of vital importance to ask you. Think well before you answer. I want you to cast your mind back to Saturday night again. Yes—it’s to do with the Clayton affair. Now, did you on your way back from Keswick pass a Nonock lorry anywhere on the road between Portinscale and the Derwent?”

Freddie seemed to be thinking for a minute, then: “No, Inspector. I’m quite sure I didn’t. There was so little traffic on the road, that if I had, I’m certain I should have remembered the fact.”

“Then what about between Portinscale and Keswick?”

“No. I never passed a Nonock lorry at all. Positive!”

“You went straight from Keswick to Braithwaite—main road all the way?”

“Yes. Where else could I have gone? There’s only the one road, isn’t there?”

“That’s true.” The significance of this fact struck Meredith at once. Hogg was right. There
was
only one road. “At what time did you leave the picture-house?”

“About five past seven.”

“Thanks,” concluded Meredith tersely. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

For the first time since the case had opened, excitement was Meredith’s predominating emotion. At last he had gained some really substantial information. He could only interpret Freddie Hogg’s evidence in one way—the lorry
had
left the garage at seven-thirty but before the cyclist could have met it the lorry had turned off the main road and parked, probably without lights, up a by-road. There seemed to be only one plausible explanation for this. Major Rickshaw had called at the garage when the lorry was parked beside the petrol pumps. Bettle and Prince would therefore realize that there was no hope of concealing the fact that they had called on Clayton. What then is their move? They drive off and when the road is clear, park up a side-turning. Prince then returns on foot to the main road and waits there until he sees somebody pass in the direction of Braithwaite. In this case—Freddie Hogg. He realizes that there is every chance of Hogg seeing Clayton, which is exactly what he wants, since the lorry is no longer there. The coast being clear, he then returns, on some pretext or other, to the garage. He probably explains that the carburettor is giving trouble again and asks Clayton to lend a hand. Before they leave the garage, however, Prince gets Clayton to take a drink out of his whisky-flask. Whilst waiting for the trional to take effect, he engages Clayton in conversation and the moment he is unconscious, drags him to the garage, sits him in the car, arranges the hose and mackintosh, starts up the engine and rushes off to rejoin Bettle on the lorry. By driving the lorry all-out they manage to make the depot in plausible time and thus establish an alibi.

So far so good. “Now,” thought Meredith with a wry smile, “for the snags.” He was too old a hand at the game to expect everything to go his own way without difficulties. Almost immediately several objections to his new-found theory reared their undesirable heads.

First he dealt with the time factor. The road was clear for Prince at seven-thirty-five—say, five minutes for him to walk from the first of the side-turnings (the one in which he had found the glass) to the garage. Say another five minutes offering an explanation for his return and getting Clayton to have a swig from his whisky-flask. Twenty minutes, at least, according to Dr. Burney, for the trional to take effect. At least another ten minutes to get the unconscious man into the car, fit up the apparatus and start the engine. Then another five minutes to get back to the lorry. In all—forty-five minutes. That was to say, the lorry would set off for the depot at eight-twenty, arriving there somewhere about nine-thirty. But both Prince and Bettle had assured him that they started at seven-thirty and had a clear run to Penrith; and they must have known that it would be a simple matter to check up on this statement. So it rather looked as if his nice little theory was already knocked on the head.