The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (42 page)

A legal representative of the company, as well as a district goods manager of the Chatham and South-Eastern, accompanied Stacey and Magnum to the fresh inspection of it. The insurance lawyer – dry, thin-lipped, pince-nezed, cynically critical, abundantly sure of himself – allowed a ghost of an acidulated smile to flicker around his eyes as he viewed Magnum’s air of expectant triumph. The goods manager preserved an attitude of strict neutrality. Stacey was on a hair-trigger of expectation, masked under a pose of legal dignity and self-restraint.

The railway official broke the seals on the door of the compartment, and threw it open for Magnum’s inspection. The latter’s shrewd eyes darted about the interior, taking in every detail.

To all appearance, it was an entirely ordinary, humdrum, commonplace, second-class compartment, carrying no hint of tragedy. The dead man’s ulster, umbrella, and travelling-bag, replaced on the rack in the position where they had first been found, merely suggested that some traveller had left them there while he went out to buy a journal at a book-stall. A small volume of Lamb’s Essays, lying on a corner seat, might have been put there to secure his place.

Then Magnum asked to see the two adjoining compartments – one a smoker, one a general compartment. They were bare of extraneous objects and entirely unsuggestive.

“Well?” challenged the opposing lawyer, with his thin and acid smile. “Have you discovered some point we all have been dense enough to miss?”

“There are always two sides to every question,” returned Magnum.

“Your side and my side?”

“The inside and the outside,” amended Magnum, with a cutting edge to his words.

“And the application of that very sound maxim?”

“The application is that to view the outside one needs a ladder.”

“And why a ladder, may I ask?”

“I am not a ‘Child’s Guide to Knowledge,’ but if you are seriously anxious for an answer to your question, it is in order to climb.” Having delivered this snub, Magnum turned, and addressed himself to the goods manager: “Please send for a short ladder, so that I can examine the roof.”

When it arrived, Magnum mounted briskly to the roof of the carriage, and looked for the footprints or traces of a man having crawled over the roof, which he confidently expected to find. A grievous disappointment awaited him. The roof was streaked with raindrops trickling over soot, now dried into the semblance of a map of some fantastic mountain range. There were no footprints.

“Did it rain on the day of the accident?” he asked sharply.

Stacey, after a moment’s thought, replied in the affirmative.

“Unfortunate,” commented Magnum. “Rain would have obliterated footprints. Come up here.”

At last Stacey understood what Magnum was driving at. “
From the sky!
” had been the concluding words of the warning to the dead man. Someone had crawled on the roof, pulled up the lamp over the compartment in which Jonasson was travelling, and then – In a flash he pictured the old man alone in the compartment, through the long tunnel, where a cry for help would be drowned in the roar of the rushing train, looking upwards to see a menacing face staring at him from the aperture of the lamp, a revolver at cock, and ready to shoot him down in any corner of the compartment. Trapped, helpless, terrified, Jonasson had tried to escape by the door, and had been thrown on to the line.

Magnum, moving forward over the roof, in plain view of the others, went to pull up the lamp and demonstrate his point.

But a sentence from the railway official checked him in mid-action.

“You are thinking of the old type of lamp, sir. These ones are not removable. They’re fixtures.”

Magnum, incredulous, went on; found the lamp screwed in tight, and the screws rusted in firmly.

The insurance lawyer permitted himself a dry laugh of cynical amusement.

“Facts,” said he, “have an unfortunate habit of contradicting the most ingenious and elegant theories.”

Magnum was now thoroughly roused by the mocking mystery of the railway compartment. He had, in plain words, made a fool of himself in front of the insurance lawyer. That was unbearable. The only way to get back his self-respect was to wrest out the secret, and flourish it in the lawyer’s face.

Before, Magnum had been only halfheartedly interested in a problem which was somewhat outside his professional line; now, he was resolutely determined to work at it with a red-hot concentration of energies.

Hurrying to New Cross Station with Stacey, he took ticket to Paddock Wood, beyond Tonbridge, where Jonasson had lived his recluse life in a country cottage a couple of miles away from the railway line, alone save for a housekeeper-servant. On the way, Magnum plied Stacey with question after question regarding the life-history, the habits and eccentricities of the dead man. Stacey’s information was limited; the housekeeper could tell much more.

On their arrival, they found the cottage bolted and barred. A hedger and ditcher, working in a neighbouring lane, expressed the thoughtful opinion that the housekeeper must have locked up and gone away. Where? demanded Magnum, assisting his cerebrations with a couple of half-crowns. He didn’t rightly know. Could he find out by asking neighbours? That struck the hedger as an idea of great brilliance, and, dropping his tools, he set off to make inquiries.

Meanwhile, Magnum, impatient of obstacles, broke a window in the cottage, and secured unconventional entrance. With Stacey’s guidance, he went through the dead man’s books and papers and personal possessions in search of a fresh light on the mystery.

Both were now firmly convinced that Jonasson had come to his death by foul play, or, more exactly, that he had been terrified out of the closed railway compartment by some human agency. Both were equally of the opinion that it was a matter of long-standing revenge, reaching back into the obscurities of Jonasson’s past life.

But mere opinions would be poor weapons for a big law-case. They must have
facts.
They must find out whom, why, how. They must be prepared to prove in court how a man, indisputably alone in a railway-compartment, with closed doors, closed windows, and no aperture for human entrance, could be so terrified as to be driven out. In case of danger the first thought of any man would be to pull the alarm-chain running through from compartment to compartment. Why had Jonasson not done so?

A long search through books, papers, and clothes proved annoyingly inconclusive. Jonasson’s tastes were evidently cultured and leisured. Whatever he might have been in his youth, in the immediate past he had been a trifler with books, garden, and fishing. That gave them no help.

In the bedroom of the dead man, Magnum on a sudden impulse threw up the window. Outside it, he was surprised to find a screen of fine-meshed wire netting.

“Why this?” he asked to Stacey.

“To keep out summer insects, I should imagine.”

Magnum suddenly became very thoughtful, hunching his bushy eyebrows and twisting at his straggly beard.

The hedger and ditcher, beaming with pride at the success of his detective work, came to announce that the housekeeper had gone to visit a married daughter living at Tonbridge.

“We’ll go there at once,” said Magnum; “and the first question to ask her is why Jonasson put up that wire netting.”

Stacey looked at him questioningly.

“The loaded revolver he kept in his bedroom,” pursued Magnum, “is nothing out of the ordinary for a nervous man living in a lonely country cottage. But the wire screen is highly unusual. The unusual is worth analysis.”

An hour later, they were at Tonbridge. Mrs Pritchett was readily found in the parlour above her daughter’s confectionery shop in the High Street – a time-worn, grey-haired, grey-minded woman, resigned to the arrows of misfortune, dull of speech, with that love for irrelevant, side-track detail which goes so often with one of limited interests and narrow outlook. Magnum, with his impatience of slowness, found his temper distinctly tried during his endeavours to get relevant answers to his pointed questions. In essence, her information amounted to this:

Mr Jonasson had had the wire screen fixed up six months previously. He was a very reserved man, liking to give orders without giving reasons. It was in wintertime, so that there was no reason to guard against wasps, gnats, or mosquitoes. No; she had no idea why he wanted it, but he was very concerned about having it put up at once.

“At once?” questioned Magnum, seizing on the suggestiveness of the phrase.

It was directly after he received a visit from the dark gentleman with the gold-rimmed spectacles. High words had passed between them. No; she had no idea who he was. Mr Jonasson was very reserved, keeping his affairs entirely to himself. The dark gentleman was a foreigner – he looked like a half-caste. He was seen in the neighbourhood of Paddock Wood three months later. She believed that this man must have tried to murder Mr Jonasson in the train. She was convinced that he was hiding under the seat of the compartment.

“That has been proved impossible,” put in Stacey.

Mrs Pritchett was of the opinion that nothing was impossible to a foreigner.

Regarding the past life of the dead man, her information was mostly conjecture, embroidered fantastically after the fashion of country gossip. The only definite fact was that he had gone to Africa as a young man. The name “Uganda” persisted in her memory. At one time he had kept souvenirs of Africa in his study, but some years back he had made a clean sweep of them, burning them in a bonfire at the end of the garden.

Letters? When Mr Jonasson received letters, he usually burnt them. No, indeed, she never pried into his private papers! She hoped she knew her place! No; she didn’t listen to the conversation between Mr Jonasson and the foreigner. She couldn’t help hearing that they were angry with one another, but to suggest that she would stoop to listen at a keyhole—

“If you had,” retorted Magnum impatiently, “Mr Jonasson might be alive today.”

Mrs Pritchett relapsed into the easy tears of old age, and it took all Stacey’s efforts to comfort her.

“You’ll be saying next as it was me as murdered him!” she cried accusingly at Magnum.

He offered a sovereign as consolation for wounded feelings, and the interview proceeded. But no further information of importance resulted.

Magnum and Stacey returned to town. The scientist chose an empty second-class compartment of the same type as the mystery carriage, and asked Stacey to leave him there alone during the journey.

At Cannon Street, when Stacey went to rejoin his friend, he found Magnum glowing with excitement.

“I think we’ve got it!” he cried, slapping Stacey on the shoulder with a lusty thump. “First set your detectives on the hunt for that half-caste with the gold-rimmed spectacles.”

“Yes, I’d settled to do that,” returned the young lawyer; “but even if we find him, it doesn’t help much for our side of the case. Assume that he threatened to murder Jonasson-assume that Jonasson was in deadly terror of him-assume that he travelled in the next compartment to Jonasson. Even then the Empire Company would claim that the deceased threw himself out of the train-suicide while temporarily insane, but still
suicide.
The fifty thousand pound policy money will never come to Miss Gerard unless we can show the court
how
Jonasson was terrified out of an empty compartment.”

“I believe I can do it,” returned Magnum emphatically. “The phial of atoxyl he carried in his pocket, the book on sleeping sickness, the wire screen to his bedroom window, Uganda the home of the tsetse fly – they fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. One more piece in place, and the whole pattern would stand out. To-morrow we’ll search that sealed compartment once again.”

“In the presence of the Empire’s lawyer?”

“Naturally. Arrange it for the afternoon. And if I can show him that Magnum is not quite the fool he imagines—”

As mentioned before, Magnum was not without a dash of very human vanity.

On the following afternoon, the same four were back in the shed where the mystery carriage stood mutely waiting to deliver up its secret. The insurance lawyer’s acidulated smile was now fattened out to a mellow tolerance. He was no longer afraid of any of Magnum’s theories. The goods manager, while still outwardly neutral, had transferred his sympathies to the side of the Empire Company.

Although it was summer, Magnum wore a pair of thick gloves. In his side-pocket a packet bulged out noticeably.

“I want every inch of the compartment swept out,” he said to the railway official. “Will you do it yourself, so as to avoid any suspicion that might arise if I were to do so?”

Tolerantly, the goods manager called for a carriage-cleaner’s broom, and proceeded to the task, sweeping around the cornices, behind the cushions, and underneath the seats, and gathering the sweepings into a small pile, while the other three watched intently from outside.

“Stop!” called Magnum suddenly, his eyes alight with unsuppressed triumph. From the sweepings he picked up a large insect, dead, and displayed it emphatically in his gloved hand in front of the insurance lawyer.

“A tsetse fly!” he stated.

“Well; and what if it is?”

“The carrier of the sleeping sickness. Deadly. One sting from it, and a man would stand a poor chance.”