Smallbone Deceased (22 page)

Whether she's in any danger or not, said Bohun, following the tramlines round the Lewisham bend, it's my fault that she went down there, and it's my responsibility that nothing happens to her. The best thing I can do is to let them both know I'm there and I'll camp out in the garden until morning. I shouldn't think even Miss Cornel would dare make a move with me on her front lawn.

Where was Hazlerigg?

An A.A. scout, coming home from a late call, gave him some directions and he swung south through Bromley. His thoughts reverted to Miss Cornel.

He wondered if everybody was always as slow and as stupid as they had all been, at seeing what lay under their noses. Of course, neither of her alibis was worth the paper it was written on. To start with, her companion at the office on that Saturday morning had been
Eric Duxford.
He could guess how much that meant. Eric no doubt arrived, put in a nominal ten minutes' work and then went straight away to his other office. In fact, now that Bohun thought of it, had there not been an entry in Eric's “private” appointment diary for eleven o'clock on February 10th – the very Saturday morning in question? Then, again, was it pure luck that Miss Cornel should have been at the office with such an accommodating partner? He rather thought not. It had originally been Miss Chittering's Saturday. Miss Cornel's story was that Miss Cluttering had asked her to change Saturdays. What would Miss Chittering's version have been – if anyone had thought to ask her?

And was that one of the reasons why Miss Glittering had been – steady! Road fork, Sevenoaks, nine miles. He was getting on. That was the weekend they should have concentrated on from the start. They knew Smallbone was alive up till Saturday morning. Instead of trying to find out how he spent the next week they should have realized …

But did one ever realize that the obvious explanation, the simple explanation was the right one?

All that speculation about the key of the deed box! Of course the one person who could most easily lay hands on it was Miss Cornel. Or about the difficulty of getting Marcus Smallbone to attend at the office at a given time. Who would be more likely to fix such an appointment than Miss Cornel? Or as to how the letter intending to incriminate Bob got under Miss Cornel's desk? And why it wasn't found before it had to be? Then there was the Tuesday of Miss Chittering's death. Miss Cornel really had no alibi at all. It was the very simplicity of the idea which had made it so difficult to get hold of. Probably she had not gone to Charing Cross that night. There was no reason for her to do so. She could catch the train just as well from London Bridge or Waterloo. There was the very slight risk of meeting a passenger who knew her. She lived alone. Of course, the confusion caused by the electricity cut had been a help.

Steady again! He must be near by now. He remembered that Sergeant Plumptree, describing his visit to Sevenoaks, had said that Miss Cornel's bungalow lay north of the town. He would have to take a left fork soon.

His headlights picked out a signpost; then he saw the policeman standing in the shadow of the hedge.

He braked sharply.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I'm looking for a bungalow called Red Roofs. A Miss Comet lives there.”

“Five hundred yards along on your right, sir,” said the policeman impassively.

Bohun thanked him. He was moving when it occurred to him to wonder if it would have been wiser to have asked the policeman to come with him.

Then another thought struck him. The policeman had answered his question very promptly. And, though he had looked for it, he hadn't seen the bicycle which he would have expected if the man had been a patrol.

He had more the look of someone posted …

Here it was.

A neat garden. A low hedge. Bohun cut out the engine and cruised the last hundred yards. Then he got out and switched off his headlights.

The moon, reflecting from the window glass of the front room, made it difficult to see if there was a light behind the curtains or not.

He thought not. The house was very quiet.

As Bohun walked up the flagged path he had a sharp, clear picture of Miss Cornel coining out of the front door with a smile on her mouth and a heavy spade in one muscular hand.

Moonlight and imagination!

Then the front door did open quietly: but it was Inspector Hazlerigg who stepped out.

Chapter Sixteen

… Later …

THE BILL OF COSTS IS PRESENTED

“E. and O.E.”

The Crown, on the advice of its Law Officers, preferred only one charge against Miss Cornel: the murder of Marcus Smallbone. To this charge, despite the strongest persuasion of her advisers, Miss Cornel pleaded guilty. After a formal hearing, therefore, Mr. Justice Arbuthnot pronounced the sentence of death. It was then represented to the Home Secretary that although the available evidence as to the prisoner's state of mind – her fanatical attachment to her late employer and the lack of any motive of personal gain in her crime – were not sufficient to support a plea of unbalance of mind, they might properly be considered in relation to the Crown's prerogative of mercy. The Home Secretary, after due consideration, commuted the sentence to one of penal servitude for life.

On the day that he announced his decision, three conversations of interest took place.

II

“Did you ever think that Sergeant Cockerill might have done those murders?” asked Bohun.

“Originally, he was fairly high up on my list,” admitted Inspector Hazlerigg. “Why?”

“It's academic now, of course. But he had a motive—much the same sort of motive as Miss Cornel had, actually. You knew he used to be Abel's batman.”

“Yes. We'd dug down as far as that.”

“Then again, he had plenty of very good opportunities.”

“Quite so. Might I ask when you decided that he was
not
a murderer?”

“When I heard him sing,” said Bohun. “The fellow's an artist. No one who sings Bach like that could kill a man with a piece of picture wire. That's a commercial, utilitarian way of killing. An artist would have too much respect for the beauty of the human neck. He might shoot a man in a fine frenzy, or stab him with a stiletto, or—you're laughing at me.”

“Don't stop,” said Hazlerigg. “It's a pleasure to listen to you. You know, you'd get on famously with our modem school. Pickup is always lecturing me on their theories. They think that all detection should be a combination of analysis and hypnosis.”

“It's all very well for you to laugh,” said Bohun crossly, “but if you think it's nonsense, what were
you
doing at that concert? I saw you.”

“If you really want to know,” said Hazlerigg, “I was doing something which might have been done a good deal sooner. I was finding out how Sergeant Cockerill spent his Saturday mornings.”

“How he spent—”

“Yes. Did it never seem to you to be rather an odd arrangement that he should appear at the office for a few minutes at half-past nine or ten, then disappear for two or three hours, and turn up again at twelve-thirty. How did you suppose he spent the middle of the morning?”

“I don't think I ever really gave it a thought,” said Bohun. “But I can see you're longing to tell me. What did he do?”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” said Hazlerigg, “he used to rehearse. But I found there was a little more to it than that. One of his neighbours, who was also in the choir, used to give him a lift in his car, and wait for him afterward and take him home. A Colonel Lincoln. A very respectable man and an unimpeachable witness. He used to park his car in New Square while Cockerill locked up. He says Cockerill never kept him waiting more than two minutes.”

“That sounds pretty conclusive,” agreed Bohun.

“I was fairly certain, even before that,” said Hazlerigg. “That was only corroboration. As I frequently said, the sheet anchor of my faith all along was the conviction that the same person must have done both killings. Now I agree that on the face of it Cockerill could quite easily have killed Smallbone. But he could never have killed Miss Chittering.”

“Well, do you know, it just occurred to me to wonder,” said Bohun. “It's true that Mason, the porter, was with him when he was approaching the building—”

“I know what you're going to say. It occurred to me, too. You thought that Cockerill might have gone inside and quietly noosed Miss Chittering during the time that Mason was fooling around with that pigeon. I timed it the next night. He would have had about four minutes. I suppose it was barely possible feasible. I mean, in a detective-story sense. But apart from the improbability of it, there was one factor which I think ruled it out of court. I went along with Mason the next night to check up and he was quite emphatic about it.
All
the office lights were out. There's a fanlight over the secretaries' room and you can see at once if that light's on. According to Mason it wasn't. The reason for that's plain enough, of course. When Miss Cornel had finished with Miss Glittering she turned the lights out and pulled the door shut—she didn't
want
the body to be discovered at once. It would have made everybody's alibis far more confusing, in fact, if the discovery could have been delayed until the next morning.”

“Yes. By the way, how did she get back into the building without being seen by anybody?”

“I don't suppose she ever left the building. She probably sat, in the dark, on the next flight of stairs and waited till the coast was clear.”

“What a ruthless woman,” said Bohun. “And, incidentally, what a nerve.”

“A strong left wrist isn't the only thing you develop in a Women's Golf Championship,” said Hazlerigg.

III

“'Darling,” said Anne Mildmay. “You remember that awful night.”

“Which awful night?” said Bob, looking up from what he was doing. “Oh, at Sevenoaks—yes.”

“Do you think I was drugged?”

“I don't know,” said Bob. “You had a very advanced hangover the next morning.”

“But what would have been the point of it?”

“If you ask me,” said Bob, “it wasn't drugs at all. It was two glasses of neat whisky coupled with the excitement.”

“And what was I supposed to be excited about?” demanded Anne coldly.

“The prospect of marrying a fanner,” said Bob.

Silence fell again on the little room, with its French window which opened on to an uncut lawn running down to a quiet river under a silver September sky.

“The joke of it is,” said Bob, “that I took up farming to get away from office work.” He wiped the ink off his finger on to one of the tassels of the tablecloth.

“Never mind,” said Anne. “Get on and finish that ‘Milk Marketing—Cows in Calf—Feeding Stuffs—1950–51—Estimated quantities,' and I'll take it down to the post after tea.”

IV

That same afternoon, Bohun, back in the office, was drinking his tea (as a partner he now had it brought to him in a cup
with
a saucer) and watching Mr. Craine. No one, he reflected, would have thought that the cheerful little man had just completed a very trying six months. His reserves of vitality were amazing. He had paid off the Husbandmen and dealt firmly with their scruples about suppressing the details of Abel's most irregular mortgage. He had used the balance of Bohun's money judiciously to strengthen the finances of the firm. He had taken on three new assistants, and had snapped up the services of John Cove, now inexplicably qualified. He had undertaken the whole cost and the endless work involved in Miss Cornel's defence. He had smoothed down the susceptibilities of innumerable clients. He had engaged a new, even more ravishing and, at the moment, inexperienced secretary. She was learning quickly.

“I can't help thinking,” Mr. Craine was saying, “that Sherlock Holmes would have done it all a lot quicker.”

“Why particularly?” said Bohun.

“Right up his street,” said Mr. Craine. “I don't mean Holmes particularly. I mean any real
thinking
detective. I was reading a book the other day—the detective was a Tibetan Grand Lama aged 135, a real genius at reasoning things out—he found that the murderer was left-handed. He interviewed all the suspects one after the other, and handed them a cigarette. The one who held out his left hand was the murderer.”

Bohun thought about this.

“I'm afraid it wouldn't have worked,” he said. “All they'd have done would be to catch the wrong chap.”

“But I thought Hazlerigg said—”

“He said that the photographs showed that the murderer's left wrist was stronger than the right wrist. That's all. Miss Cornel isn't left-handed in the sense that she uses her left hand in preference to her right. On the other hand Sergeant Cockerill
is
left-handed.”

“What!”

“Well, he's a man who does a two-handed job by holding the object in his right hand and making the movements with his left. A right-handed man usually does it the other way about.”

“When did you notice that?”

“I noticed it when he came into my room on the Tuesday or Wednesday—it was almost my first day in the office.”

“I see.” Mr. Craine drank some of his tea, got to his feet and said energetically. “If Miss Cornel was mad, then I'm mad and you're mad. We're all of us mad.”

Bohun nodded.

“I'm glad she didn't hang, though,” he said. “After she'd killed Smallbone—and the real reason, the
inner
reason for that I don't suppose we shall ever know-everything else was self-defense. The killing of Miss Glittering and the efforts to throw the blame on to Bob. She was fighting for her life.”

“Do you know,” said Mr. Craine. “I'm not sure that even now I quite understand about that rucksack. And who was the little man from the Left Luggage Office that Hazlerigg was going to subpoena?”

“I think,” said Bohun, “that that was the most truly remarkable thing about the whole business. The single thin, unbreakable thread of causation which joined the body of Marcus Smallbone to the Left Luggage Office at London Bridge Station. It turned on such a trivial series of events, and yet it was strong enough to cause the death of at least one innocent person.”

“Strong enough to bring Miss Cornel into the dock,” said Mr. Craine. “It seemed to me to be the only tangible evidence they had. I admit it never came to the test, because she pleaded guilty—but all that stuff about rolling screws and left wrists—Macrea would have made pretty short work of that.”

“I rather agree. Well, here's how it worked. Miss Cornel decides to kill Smallbone. She decides, for a number of reasons, that the best place to do it is at the office, on a Saturday morning, when she knows she will be alone. Then she must devise a hiding place where the body may lie hidden for some little time. Eight or ten weeks will be enough. Fortunately, there
is
such a hiding place. One of the boxes, so handy, so capacious, so fortunately airtight. She selects the one least likely to be opened in the course of the day's work, and steals, or copies, the key. The fact that this box happened to contain the papers of the very trust of which the victim was a trustee was bizarre but coincidental. But it was these papers, you note, which constituted the first real snag. And this was where the Horniman office system signally justified its founder. In no other office—in no other solicitors' office in London, I think—would the disposal of a bundle of papers and files and account books have caused the murderer any embarrassment. There would have been a dozen places where they could have decently been laid to rest with other papers, out of sight and out of mind, collecting as the months and years went by only a further coating of black dust. In this office they would have been noticed in twenty-four hours—the fat would have been in the fire with a vengeance. Therefore they had to be disposed of
out of
the office.”

“Well, that oughtn't to have been too difficult,” said Mr. Craine. “She could have—let me see, now—dropped them into the Thames.”

“In broad daylight?”

“Or taken them home and burned them in her garden.”

“She particularly did
not
want to arrive at Sevenoaks station—where she was well known and very likely to be noticed—carrying a bulky package. The fact could easily have been remembered.”

“Then she could have—well, you tell me.”

“It wasn't all that easy,” said Bohun, “and she thought it out very carefully. On the Saturday morning in question, on the way to the office, she stopped and purchased a large green rucksack. She had it wrapped up, as a parcel, at the shop—explaining that it was a gift for a friend—and brought it to the office with her. Once Eric Duxford had departed on his private business and she was alone, she took all the papers out of the Stokes box and proceeded to cut out, with her nail scissors, all references in the papers to Horniman, Birley and Craine. It wasn't too bad, because it was mostly account books and schedules of investments—not letters. I expect she burned the snippets then and there. The rest of the papers, now comparatively unidentifiable, went into the rucksack. After she had finished with Smallbone and left the office, she carried the rucksack with her—a little luck was necessary not to be seen coming out of the office with it, but Lincoln's Inn is a very deserted place on Saturday morning. When she got to London Bridge she deposited it in the Left Luggage Office. She knew that unclaimed packages were opened after six months, but she reckoned that even when that happened no one would be smart enough to connect a lot of old papers without any name on them with Horniman, Birley and Craine, and thus with the Lincoln's Inn murder. Ten to one they would have been sent for pulping without another thought. And further and more important even if the connection was noticed, there was no one to connect
her
with the rucksack. It was a common type. She had bought it at a large and busy shop and paid cash. And she had been careful that no one who knew her had seen it in her possession.”

He paused.

“It was a bit of bad luck, so shattering that it seems to belong to the realm of reality rather than the realm of Art, that this particular rucksack should have been sold to her by the head of the Camping Department of Messrs. Merry weather and Matlock.”