Case for Sergeant Beef (16 page)

‘To call on Mr Chickle, of course.'

I let the ‘of course' pass, and prepared to follow Beef, accepting his suggestion of warm clothes and a torch. He
himself had a woollen scarf round his neck when we set out. It was a dark night with a thin chilly drizzle from low clouds. We needed our torches to find the footpath across to Mr Chickle's house. I trudged along, taking care not to slip on the sticky ground and not attempting to get more information from Beef, since I know from experience that it is useless to catechize him.

We found ‘Labour's End' to be well lighted, and I was glad of its cheerful aspect as we approached. But I thought there was something sinister about the gaunt figure of Mrs Pluck when she opened the door to us. She stared at us without speaking, and I'm sure there was fear in her big, hollow eyes. I had the impression that she found our visit unwelcome, though half-expected, and that she was relieved when Beef asked to see Mr Chickle.

The old gentleman was sitting beside a large fire when we entered his cosy book-lined room, and rose to greet us. In his manner, too, I sensed something strange, though with him it certainly was not fear.

Beef spoke as respectfully and politely as I could wish. He called Mr Chickle ‘Sir', and said that he had come to warn him that his peace would probably be disturbed on the following day by an invasion from Boy Scouts.

Mr Chickle beamed and assured Beef that so far from disturbing him it would be a pleasure. As he grew older, he said, he liked more and more to see young people enjoying themselves, and it would not be the first time that the Scouts had played Cowboys and Indians in the wood.

‘They won't be playing Cowboys and Indians this time,' said Beef rather harshly. ‘They'll be doing a little job for me.'

Mr. Chickle seemed amused and mildly interested, and wondered if ‘detectives and criminals' was a new variation of the game.

‘In a way you might say so,' said Beef. ‘What they're going to do is to search every inch of Deadman's Wood in parties. Every inch of it. And bring me whatever they find.'

‘And what will they find?' asked Mr Chickle blandly.

‘I shouldn't be surprised but what they might find something that will help to clear up this murder case.'

‘Yes. I see. A clue, in fact?'

‘Perhaps a clue.'

‘It's very good of you to have come up to tell me,' smiled Mr Chickle.

‘Well, we were on our way back from Copling, sir. I thought we would just call in.'

And Beef almost literally licked his chops just as a village policeman might when he has brought back a straying dog to his owner and expects to be offered a drink. Mr Chickle was not slow to perceive what Beef expected of him.

‘A drink, Sergeant?' he suggested. ‘I have a little reserve of Scotch, I'm glad to say.'

‘I don't mind if I do, sir,' said Beef inevitably, and before long we were wishing good health to our host. But we did not linger for more than a few moments over the drink. Beef remembered that we had a darts match at our inn, and after cordial good nights we started towards Barnford.

But we had not gone more than fifteen yards when Beef stopped round the bend of a curve.

‘Now,' he said, ‘we go back and wait. If anyone comes out of the door of that house we follow him or her. But we don't get ourselves seen or heard until I speak out. Got it?'

It is at moments like this that Beef is at his best. In spite of his age and bulk – for he is close on fifty now and a heavy and powerful man at that – he can move as swiftly and silently as some great feline. He ceases to be the ungainly overgrown boy that I sometimes think him, and becomes genuinely a man of action. I am the first to criticize Beef, but I always admit that in an emergency his nerve and quickness of action are remarkable.

In the drizzle and darkness of that night he led the way to a point from which, while remaining concealed ourselves, we could watch both the front door and back door of ‘Labour's End'. And there we stood, sheltered a little from the cold moisture of the night, but still wet, chilled, and uncomfortable for the best part of an hour. Beef discouraged
me even from whispering, and when I signed to him that I would like to smoke a cigarette, he shook his head vigorously. I had begun to think that he had miscalculated and that our wet vigil was to be in vain, when some lights were switched out in the house, and a few moments later we saw the small figure of Mr Chickle in the open doorway outlined against the only light left burning within. He had opened the front door noiselessly and was engaged in closing it in silence.

‘Ready?' whispered Beef.

When the little man started up the path which led to Miss Shoulter's home, we were behind him. I followed Beef as he dodged behind trees in his advance, keeping us out of sight and hearing, but never losing sight of Chickle. It was exhausting and difficult, but at least it was what I had demanded of Beef – it was action.

Presently Beef, who was ahead of me and could see our quarry, stopped. For some minutes I had been unable to catch more than a glimpse of Mr Chickle and had been satisfied to leave observation to Beef while I concentrated on moving in silence and remaining unseen. It appeared now that Beef was annoyed by something that had happened on the path ahead.

‘He's dived into the wood,' he whispered to me. ‘Can't follow him there. Just have to wait here and chance it.'

‘Chance what?'

‘You'll see.'

Again there was a long uncomfortable wait. My feet felt as though they had been pushed into a ‘Frigidaire' for several hours, and I was longing for a smoke. Beef, however, seemed to strain his eyes in watching the path ahead, never moving from beside me and never turning away. Ten or fifteen minutes must have passed.

Suddenly, Beef began to walk forward, no longer dodging among the trees, and at the same time flashed his powerful torch far down the path ahead. In its beam I could see Mr Chickle coming towards us. Beef was talking loudly to me.

‘We shall have to hurry,' I heard him say. ‘Ah, here's Mr Chickle. Why, you've dropped your parcel, sir. There it is just in the grass behind you.'

‘So I have,' said Mr Chickle.

Beef stooped to pick up the little bundle which had been dropped. It consisted of something wrapped in a piece of mackintosh. Beef handed it politely to Mr Chickle.

‘Thanks, thanks. It really doesn't matter. Very much obliged to you.'

I had never seen the little man in such a state of confusion.

No one moved for a few moments. Then Mr Chickle seemed to pull himself together.

‘Darts match cancelled?' he asked. There was nothing openly sarcastic in his tone, but I felt that it was not quite natural.

‘Yes. The other side never turned up.' It was funny, I thought, that it was Beef who did the explaining of our presence there, and Chickle who said nothing to justify his.

‘To tell you the truth, sir,' Beef went on. ‘We have just heard a bit more from the police. We were on our way to call on Mr Bridge.'

Mr Chickle became animated.

‘Mr Bridge, eh? I told you he was a violent young man.'

‘Ah,' said Beef. ‘You've been having a stroll yourself, sir?'

Mr Chickle seemed to be deciding whether or not he should speak.

‘Yes, Sergeant. And to tell the truth, I've made a very curious discovery. I was going to keep it for the police, but since you've come along so opportunely, I may as well tell you first.'

‘Very much obliged to you.'

Mr Chickle began to unroll the mackintosh of his parcel and revealed the largest pair of woman's shoes I have ever seen.

‘Well, I never!' said Beef. ‘Miss Shoulter's, I take it?'

‘They
were
Miss Shoulter's,' said Mr Chickle, who seemed
now to have recovered himself. ‘They were made especially for her. Outsize, you know. But they have been in my possession since then. I had to purchase them in a lot at one of our worthy curate's auctions. What I cannot understand is this. Two months ago I myself put these shoes in my own dustbin, expecting, I might say hoping, never to set eyes on them again. And to-night while I'm taking the litde stroll I have for the sake of sound sleep, I find them wrapped in this piece of old mackintosh beside the footpath. How do you account for that?'

‘Funny,' was Beef's comment.

‘Do you think it has any connexion with the crime?'

‘Hard to say,' said Beef. ‘Very hard to say.'

A few minutes later we left him, this time to go home and sleep, I hoped. I know that when at last we reached our inn, having waited another half-hour in the cold and rain to make sure that we should not have another encounter with Chickle, I was pleased to get between the sheets. But Beef had been chuckling to himself with pleasure all the way home.

S.B.—5

A
ND
what must Beef do next day but organize and lead his ridiculous Boy Scouts' treasure hunt. It was a Saturday, I remember, and having a holiday the boys turned up in great numbers. Beef sat under a tree with the patrol-leaders about him and intricate plans seemed to be drawn up during the discussion in the course of which there was a good deal of repetition of that ‘every inch' phrase of Beef's which had already been used a number of times. Personally, I sat apart and smoked a pipe, regretting once again that I had relented in my decision to throw up the chronicling of Beef's exploits and turn to the less eccentric profession of insurance. Boy Scouts searching ‘every inch' of a wood, I said. Ridiculous. A good detective should know exactly what to look for and exactly where it was likely to be found, not sit discussing plans of action with patrol-leaders or whatever these sniffing and coughing youngsters might be.

Last night's episode, I admitted, had been curious. If Beef was right in supposing that the footmarks of Miss Shoulter found near the corpse had been made by someone wearing her shoes, what in the world had little Mr Chickle been doing with them at eleven o'clock at night on the very footpath of the crime? Why had he tried to drop them out of sight? Why had he said he had found them
on
the footpath when Beef had seen him disappear into the thickness of the wood and return with them? I flatter myself on being a pretty shrewd judge of a man's truthfulness, and I was convinced that his story of a little stroll for the sake of sleeping well was a fabrication. Moreover, Beef had actually been expecting him to do something of the sort that he did.

And yet I could not bring myself to suspect Mr Chickle. Apart from the fact that he had no motive, had never even
met Shoulter so far as we knew, he was obviously incapable of murder. Or even if one's imagination could be stretched to a point of believing that he might have poisoned someone, the mere association of a violent crime with the kindly little retired watchmaker was absurd.

Mrs Pluck, now, was a different matter. She had proved herself a liar in the most incriminating matter of her alibi on the night of the crime, and also in the scarcely less interesting one of her ability to fire a gun. She was a big masculine woman who could easily be capable of murder, I thought, when I remembered her big, horny hands and dour face. Then I had a brilliant inspiration. There was some mystery about her husband. I remembered her indignation when Beef had asked his name and her flat refusal to discuss that part of her life. There was also a story that Shoulter himself had been married and had deserted his wife. What if these two stories were one? What if Shoulter had been the absconding husband of Mr Chickle's strange housekeeper? Then with her false story of her movements on the night of the crime, the whole thing fitted. True the last shot noticed by the inhabitants of Deadman's Wood had been at half-past six. But what of that? With shooting so common in the vicinity, a report could easily have been unnoticed. Or perhaps Chickle knew the truth and to save his housekeeper was deliberately lying to us. That would account, too, for his evasions and odd behaviour. He knew, perhaps, that it was Mrs Pluck who had worn the outsize shoes and had concealed them in some place afterwards. When he had heard that the Scouts were to search the wood, he had decided to retrieve them in order to save the woman. It was all far more in conformity with the character of Chickle as I knew him than any suspicion that he himself was implicated.

But there were other suspects. My investigations into crime have taught me to avoid fixed ideas and to keep an absolutely open mind. There was Bridge, for instance. All very well to accept his story because he was the kind of man whom Beef liked – hard-drinking, hard-living, and over-masculine. Look at it how you like, he was a man who well
might have committed a violent crime. And it was surely something of a coincidence that he had been near the scene of the crime within a few moments of the firing of the first double shot, and that by his own admission. I was by no means prepared to accept his story blindly, and what was more, I did not believe that Beef had done so.

Of course, I could name others who might be involved, and I had to admit that the case looked pretty black against Flipp, the police suspect. There was Miss Shoulter, who might also have had a motive for all we knew, and Mr Aston was a ‘possible' since he lived in Copling, and could have been in Deadman's Wood that day, especially since it was red tape (of a kind which Beef had now found to be identical with that in his office) which had been used for faking the suicide.

‘Going over your suspects?' enquired Beef suddenly.

I started. I had not noticed him approaching.

‘Certainly not,' I said, rather huffed. ‘I know who did it.'

Beef gave his coarse laugh.

‘You know, do you?'

I decided to brazen it out.

‘I do. And I shall be interested to see how long it takes you to work it out.'

‘The police know, too,' reflected Beef.