Case Without a Corpse, page 7
“You’ve a lot to learn, Sergeant,” returned Stute. “There are times when it is better to let people talk than to make them talk. Mrs. Walker’s story had a certain amount of waste in it, but we got the information we wanted.”
I thought that the man’s description of Mrs. Walker’s irrelevances as “waste” was typical of him. There was no “waste” from Stute; he went from point to point with dour economy.
“She has enabled us at least to fill in a little more of the time-table. The only important gaps now are the times between 11 o’clock and 1, between 2.15 and 4, and between 6.30 and 8.15.”
“Yessir,” said Beef with resignation.
As we were leaving the village, the young constable who had told us the position of Rose Cottage put out his hand to indicate that he wished to speak to Stute. He hurried across to the car, and Stute dropped the window beside his seat.
“Yes, Smith?”
“There’s something more I thought you ought to know. At about 5.10 on that day, this young Rogers, with the girl who had been staying at Rose Cottage, went into the village general store.”
“Well?”
“He left his motorbike outside, and the two of them entered together. He asked if they sold rope.”
“Rope?” asked Stute quickly, and I thought there was a flash of special interest in his glance.
“Yes, sir. Mrs. Davies said she’d only got the complete clothes-lines, which are done up in skeins of twelve yards, and the young lady asked if she couldn’t sell them a smaller quantity as they only wanted it to fasten an attaché case on the motor-bicycle. Mrs. Davies said she couldn’t cut them, and the man said he’d take the whole thing.”
“Did she watch them tie it on?”
“I asked her that, sir, and she said that the shop was full and she didn’t notice, but she thinks it was some minutes before the motor-bike started up outside. That was all she knew, sir.”
“Thank you, Smith. Very useful,” said Stute, and began driving on. “I wonder,” he said to Beef, “whether a man with a name like Thackeray, or whatever it was, would have got that information for me?”
Beef was piqued. “I wonder,” he said, and then was silent. I rather sympathised with him. There was something almost priggish about Smith.
We were speeding over the Common again, and I could not help thinking of Mrs. Walker’s gruesome conviction that Stella Smythe’s body was even now lying on this waste land. It seemed that the same thought had come to Stute, for he spoke to Beef without taking his eyes from the road ahead.
“We shall have to have this place searched,” he said.
“Very good, sir,” said Beef, still rather sulky.
The rest of the drive was passed with little conversation, and I sat at the back of the car wondering what conclusions were being reached in the minds of the two investigators.
At the police station Stute was told that a man was waiting to see him, and when we had sat down once again in Beef’s little office, he was ushered in. His name, it appears, was Charles Meadows, and he was a porter employed at the railway station.
“Evening, Sarge,” he said with somewhat too much familiarity.
Beef cleared his throat. “Good evening, Meadows,” he returned in his most solemn voice. “Wot can I do for you?”
Mr. Meadows, who was a pale and rather peaked little man in his forties, leaned forward with an air of having a secret to confide. “I’ve got something to tell you,” he said.
Stute broke in. “We’re very busy,” he said. “What is it you want to say?”
Mr. Meadows looked hurt. “I was trying to help,” he said.
“Well, well. What can you tell us?”
“I saw young Rogers that evening when I was coming off duty,” he said.
“What time was that?”
“About ten to six, it would have been.”
“Where?”
“Well, I live out on the Chopley Road. I was walking along, not thinking of anything in particular, till I got past the last house in the avenue, and was going along that bit where the road goes across to our cottages….”
“That’s not very explicit,” Stute cut in. “Do you mean that there is a stretch of road without any houses on it between the last outskirts of this town and the place where you live?”
“That’s right, sir.” Poor Mr. Meadows was quite subdued by the brisk manner of Stute.
“Yes?”
“And there in front of me, by the side of the road, I saw a motor-bike pulled up. As I got nearer the man who was sitting in the saddle said, “Hullo, Charlie,” and I knew it was young Rogers.”
“You couldn’t see him though?”
“Enough to recognize him with his voice and all,” said Meadows guardedly. “There was a young lady on the pillion seat.”
“What sort of young lady?”
“I couldn’t say. She was wearing a white mackintosh, that’s all I know. The lights of the bike were in my eyes, so nothing was very clear.”
“Did Rogers say anything else?”
“Yes, I’m coming to that. He asked what time the fast train left for London. ‘This young lady,’ he said, ‘has to catch it.’ So I told him at six o’clock. And he said, ‘Thank you, Charlie. See you to-night.’ And I went on.”
“Oh. You did. What about him?”
“I didn’t really notice. I was just getting near my cottage and was soon inside. It was too cold to hang about.”
“And the girl never spoke?”
“Not while I was there.”
“I see. Thank you. Meadows. Much obliged to you.”
“That’s all right,” said Meadows, almost as disappointed as Mr. Sawyer had been at the laconic reception given to his tale. “Sorry I can’t tell you any more.”
When he had left us Stute drew paper and pen to him, and said, “Now then,” in a peremptory way.
We waited. He seemed to be thinking deeply for a moment, then he began speaking, and, almost at the same time, writing.
“We can draw up some sort of a programme of what young Rogers did that day. There are some gaps in it, and it is dependent on the words of witnesses who may be mistaken or who may be lying. But it’s some sort of plan to go on. And it’s not bad for one day’s work.”
I noticed that he ignored altogether the day that Beef had put in before he arrived. This was, as far as I can remember, what he wrote:—
10.30. Left old Rogers’s shop in Braxham.
11.0. Arrived at Rose Cottage, Chopley, and asked for Smythe.
11.5. Left Chopley.
1.0. Arrived at Riverside Private Hotel for lunch with Fairfax.
2.0. Left Riverside Private Hotel with Fairfax.
2.10. Reached the Mitre with Fairfax.
2.20. On entrance of foreigner, left Mitre with Fairfax.
2.45. Was starting up his motor-bike in the drive of Riverside Hotel.
4.0. Arrived again at Rose Cottage.
4.0–5.0. With Smythe at Rose Cottage.
5.10. Bought rope in general store at Chopley.
5.50. On road just outside Braxham speaking to Meadows.
6.10. Entered Dragon public house near the station.
6.30. Left the Dragon.
8.0. Returned to Old Rogers’s shop.
8.20. Reached Mitre where he confessed to murder, and took poison.
“Do you see any flaws in that, Sergeant?” asked Stute.
“No, sir. Not so far as wot we’ve been told’s concerned I don’t. But of course there’s some narsty gaps.”
“Quite right. There are. Suppose we allow half an hour each time for his journey to Chopley. It couldn’t take him much more, unless he had engine trouble, or was delayed in some other way. That means that there’s an hour and twenty-five minutes unaccounted for between his leaving Chopley in the morning, and reaching Riverside. Then again if it takes ten minutes to walk from Riverside to the Mitre….”
“No more, it wouldn’t,” put in Beef.
“Well, you should know, Sergeant,” said Stute.
“I always bicycles,” returned Beef.
“Anyway, say ten minutes. That leaves a quarter of an hour left blank between the time he walked out of the Mitre with Fairfax to the time he started up his motor-bike in the drive. And another three-quarters of an hour which we can’t explain between then and the time he reached Rose Cottage.”
“True enough,” said Beef after a long examination of the ‘time-table.’
“But what is most unaccountable,” said Stute, “is the hour and a half between the time he left the Dragon, and his arrival at old Rogers’s shop.”
“Yes. That is funny,” agreed Beef, stifling a yawn.
“However,” said Stute, “patience and system. We’ll fill it all in with time.”
I rose to go, for it was getting near dinnertime, and I was tired and hungry. I turned to Stute.
“Thank you so much,” I said, “for letting me come round with you to-day.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he returned with something approaching a smile, “We’re used to that, you know. A crime wouldn’t be a crime nowadays without half a dozen of you literary people hanging about after it. Why only the other day … But perhaps I’d better not tell you about her. She’d put me in her new book. Good night.”
The Sergeant followed me to the door. With a mysterious nod backwards in the direction of Stute, he began to whisper hoarsely.
“’E’s staying at the Mitre, where you are. So I shan’t go in there to-night. If you wants a game of darts after you’ve ’ad your supper, come on down to the Dragon, and I’ll see you three ‘undred an’ one up. See?”
I saw.
CHAPTER XII
I ACCEPTED Beef’s invitation, and after a cold meal, set out for the Dragon. As I passed the alley running down beside it to the river, I paused to wonder why this had so much interested Stute. His orders that the Common should be searched argued that he imagined that the murder had been committed there. Why, then, his close scrutiny of this place, and his exclamation when he had seen the landing-stage? Had this been the fruit of an earlier theory, since exploded? Or had this place seen some other aspect of the tragedy? Or was it possible that the garrulous Mrs. Walker was right when she said that there might have been more than one murder?
Certainly the alley looked sinister enough, with the high walls of the warehouse looming over it. And I supposed that a body could have been dropped from that landing-stage into the river. But … well, I knew too much about investigation to start speculating.
Beef arrived a few minutes after I did, and we leaned over the bar. When Mr. Sawyer had satisfied his more insistent customers, he came up to us.
“There was something else I could have told you to-day,” he said, and eyed us blearily.
“Wot’s that?” asked Beef.
“Well, I didn’t see why I should tell that other fellow. I didn’t like him at all.”
“’E’s all right,” said Beef. “Clever, too. You orter see ’ow ’e’s worked out all wot young Rogers was up to on Wednesday. Got it all out with the times he was there and everythink. Course, ’e’s used to it. A case like this isn’t nothink to those chaps. ’E’ll ’ave it all taped in next to no time.”
“I daresay. But I didn’t like him,” repeated Mr. Sawyer obstinately. “He didn’t seem to want to hear what anyone had got to tell him. And as I say, there was something else.”
Beef sucked his moustache and tried to look interested.
“It was about young Rogers when he came here that evening. Swearing about you something dreadful, Sergeant.”
“About me?”
“Yes. It appeared he hadn’t got a rear-light on his motor-bike. That was why he took it down the alley instead of leaving it out the front. Only I wasn’t going to tell that other fellow that. And he was saying that he wasn’t going to give you a chance of making him pay a fine. Said you’d got a down on him. But he’d like to get his own back.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes. That’s all. Only I thought you ought to know.”
Mr. Sawyer was called away to serve, but when he returned he asked how the case was going.
“If you don’t mind,” said Beef, with that absurd pomposity of his, “we won’t discuss nothink about it. I ’ave enough of these things in the day-time without being ’arassed with them at night. A man must have some life of his own.”
But when a few minutes later the obese Mr. Sawyer said he’d just thought of something else, the Sergeant showed interest again.
“It was when he was going off,” said Mr. Sawyer. “He was all dressed up in his motor-biking things and they were wet. He looked up at the clock and said he’d have to hurry. He was meeting his girl at seven o’clock he said.”
“He did, did he?” said Beef.
“Yes. It must have been about half an hour after he had come in, I should think.”
“Thank you, Mr. Sawyer,” said Beef.
An hour or two later, when I was in bed at the Mitre, I thought of the grotesque Sawyer wheezing out his trivial secret. That, I thought, was one reason why I liked following an investigation. It lifted the lid from a little town like Braxham, as nothing else could. With licence to ask the most personal and pertinent questions, the investigator could peep into a number of very divergent lives.
There was that fat publican for instance, waddling through day after day, rotting his in’ards with alcohol taken without fresh air or exercise to balance its effect, rising daily to open his dirty premises, sleeping stertorously, moving as little as possible, his brain stupefied by fumes, his eyes glazed. Lord knows what sort of a young man he had been—he was unimaginable in a form other than his present. And so he would stump on, until they had to carry his huge bloated carcase to burial.
How many other characters and stories had already been revealed by our two days’ questioning! The old Rogers couple, who had adopted a ne’er-do-well tramp, because in their own words they had “taken to him” when he had come to their shop to beg. They were, the postman had said, “crazy” about the young man, and I could well believe it when I remembered Mrs. Rogers’s tear-stained face, and the little bootmaker’s worried look. Up to a point the fellow seemed to have responded—for at least he had preferred work to imposing on the kindness they would have been only too ready to show him.
One could see so well—now—what life had been like to the old couple in their neat home behind the shop. It was dominated by the calendar, and the date on which “Alan” was due for his few days’ leave. I was almost inclined to agree with Molly Cutler when she said that young Rogers must have killed in self-defence. How else could he have faced the old people?
And the Cutlers, mother and daughter. What a curious conflict had been there. The older woman studying appearances, respectable, uncharitable—the girl lovely and free. One could see how she treated her mother—not with argument or aggression, but with a kind of secret indifference. She had never troubled to answer any of Mrs. Cutler’s ill-natured references, yet she had her own point of view. One felt that up to a point the two had agreed to differ, and, when possible, had met on what common ground they had. It wasn’t so much that Molly had concealed her love-affair from her mother. She had not discussed it, any more than she had discussed other intimate aspects of her life.
Yet she had been in love with young Rogers. There was no doubt about that. A deep and steadfast love, I thought, which had forgiven him much, and would have done much for him. What a fool the fellow had been not to have married her long ago. Unless there was some barrier of which we knew nothing.
I thought of Mrs. Murdoch, too, with her grim pretentiousness, her insistence on the use of words like “client,” “lunch,” “waiter,” in speaking of her business, and yet the rather cheerless look of her hotel. She was the sort of woman who, if she knew more than she had already admitted, would cheerfully have lied rather than involve her hotel’s name in unwelcome publicity.
Then Mrs. Walker. I thought with a smile how much of her tawdry self she had revealed. How she had been so ready to give young Rogers’s address to the enquiring Miss Smythe, and how she had gloated over the situation when the girl had come down to “get her due.” From all her garrulity nothing had emerged so clearly as the gusto with which she had watched the affair, and the chagrin she had felt at not being instantly made the chief witness. I could see her now, with her untidy red hair and not over-clean face as she poured out her precious information.
There were others who had shewn unexpected side to their natures. Mrs. Simmons, of this hotel, with her tip-toe respect for the presence of a dead body, even if it was a murderer’s body; Mr. Simmons with his instantly selfish concern for its effect on his house; Charlie Meadows, delighted to have his little part in the investigation, and the waiter at Riverside yielding to Beef’s “come off of it.”
None of these people would ever have been more to me than passers-by, but the sudden earthquake in their town which a murder had caused had scattered their conventional covering wide.
It was, of course, too early to form a theory about the actual crime, and there were too many questions unanswered. If, for instance, young Rogers had indeed killed the girl, as it would seem reasonable to suppose, when had he done it? Not, as we had half-imagined, on the Common that afternoon, for she had been seen sitting on the back of his motor-bike at ten to six near the station. And how or where could he have done it after that? If she had not gone on the six o’clock train, where had she been during the twenty minutes or more that he spent in the Dragon, from 6.10 onwards? Or again, supposing that he had killed the girl, why had the Fairfaxes disappeared? And the foreigner?
Imagining the girl out of it, and picking Fairfax as the person murdered, when could Rogers have done that? Had he taken the man out on the back of his motor-bike, and during that short time between starting up his motorbike at Riverside and arriving at Rose Cottage, murdered him and disposed of the corpse? Almost impossible. Had Fairfax remained away from Riverside all the afternoon and been murdered by Rogers after the latter had seen Smythe on her train at six o’clock? If so, where? How? And, above all, why?
