Beware of the Trains (12 page)

“By the time she got there, Hilary had left for the town to do some shopping, James had gone for a stroll, and Philip since the ambulance wasn’t expected until tea-time at the earliest was on the point of walking down to meet his wife and help her with her packages. So apart from the servant, Eve spent her first hour on the premises alone, and after she’d unpacked she wandered round the garden and eventually settled down in a deck-chair under a beech-tree, facing a coppice of beeches about three hundred yards away beyond the garden fence. She sat very still in the chair with her eyes closed, and anyone watching her must certainly have thought her asleep. But for some unexplained reason she was nervous, and her sideways jerk, when she heard the shot, was about as instantaneous as it’s possible for such a reflex to be. The bullet, from an express rifle, tore a track in her scalp and grazed her skull; another fraction of an inch and it would certainly have killed her. As it was, she was knocked unconscious, according to the doctors, the moment it touched her, and so failed to hear the second shot which immediately followed.

“Both shots, however, were heard by Mrs. Jordan and by the postman on his way up the drive, and these two witnesses converged in front of the house thirty seconds later to find Eve lying in a huddle beside the deck-chair and Hilary, white and shaken, emerging from the coppice opposite. Two minutes later Philip arrived. His wife had hurried home ahead of him, leaving him to collect and carry her parcels. And the situation was this, that James Crandall, shot through the head by Hilary, was lying in the coppice clutching the express rifle which had been fired at Eve.

“Well, the local police took over, and in due course I was called in to work with them, and we got statements from everyone concerned.” From a salmon-pink cardboard folder Humbleby extracted a sheaf of typescript. “Here, for instance, is Hilary’s, what’s relevant of it:

“‘I left my husband in the village because he had things to buy and I did not want to stay with him in case I should not be home in time to meet the ambulance. I came home across the fields, which is the shortest way, and entered the house by the back door. At this time I did not see Eve, since she was in the front garden. I was on my way up to my room to take off my hat when I saw through the open door of the gun-room that a Mannlicher express rifle was missing, and my suspicions were aroused because I knew that my husband did not have the gun, and no one else should have touched it. I thought of my cousin James Crandall, who had been asking questions about the guns. I put a small automatic pistol in my pocket and went out to look for him. I took the pistol because I was afraid James might intend some harm to Eve, whose death would benefit him. I had not liked his manner and was frightened of what he might do. I went round to the front garden where Eve was asleep in the deck-chair, and I thought I saw someone moving in the coppice. As quickly as possible I returned to the back garden and from there crossed into the field where the coppice is, entering the coppice from the side away from the garden. In the coppice I saw James with the Mannlicher pointed at Eve. I pointed my pistol at him and was about to speak when he fired and Eve fell. Immediately I fired at him. It was self-defence, I consider, because he would have killed me because I had seen him shoot Eve, but I did not intend to kill him. I am a fairly good shot with a rifle, but not with an automatic, which is a different kind of shooting.’”

Humbleby pushed the papers aside. “So much for that. Philip Bowyer heard the two shots, but by his own account he arrived too late to see anything. And that, really, is all there is to it. James Crandall’s prints were on the Mannlicher all right, and the position of his body was perfectly consistent with his having fired at Eve. On the other hand, the Bowyers undoubtedly had a very strong motive for wishing both James and Eve dead‘ and it’s easy to see how the thing
could
have been arranged. Thus: first they shoot off the rifle and hit Eve (I say ‘they’ because of course there’s no proof whatever that Philip didn’t catch up with his wife, in spite of their having left the village separately); next, James having previously been lured to the spot on any pretext you like to think of, they kill him with the automatic before he has time to as much as open his mouth; then Hilary rushes out of the coppice, leaving Philip behind to arrange the scene and put James’s fingerprints on the rifle; and finally, two minutes later, Philip appears with the astonished air of one who’s just arrived from the village with the weekly groceries… That, I repeat, is how it could have been done. But
was
it done like that? Or is Hilary’s story the simple truth?”

If these questions were other than rhetorical, Fen gave no sign of recognising the fact. “As a matter of interest,” he said, “how will Hilary’s story stand up in court?”

“Rather well, I should imagine. After all, James Crandall did have a very good motive for killing Eve, and as long as a jury can be induced to believe that he tried to do so, Hilary will never be censured for shooting him. Yes, she’ll get away with it all right. But I’m still not quite satisfied.”

“And Eve,” said Fen. “What became of her?”

“She was taken to hospital and is still there; but she’s pretty well recovered by now. I got her statement about what happened up to the moment the rifle bullet knocked her out, this morning…” Humbleby paused hopefully. “Well?” he said. “Any ideas?”

But for once Fen could only shake his head. The rain, falling heavily now, drummed against the window, and it had grown so dark that Humbleby leaned forward and switched on the desk-lamp. Lightning filled the room, and Humbleby had counted aloud up to four before the thunder came.

“The storm’s going away,” he said absently. “Well, well, I suppose there’s nothing for it except—” And then he checked himself, for Fen was staring at him with the eyes of a man half blinded by unaccustomed sunlight. “And what the devil,” said Humbleby, startled, “are you—”

He got no further. “The girl’s statement,” said Fen abruptly. “Is there a copy of it I could look at?”

“Eve’s
statement, you mean.” Humbleby sought for it in the folder and passed it across the desk. “Yes, here it is. But why—”

“Here’s what I wanted.” Fen had turned at once to the final page. “Listen to this.
‘I remember moving to one side as I heard the shot; then straight away everything went black.’”

“Well? What about it?”

Fen tapped the papers with a long forefinger. “Do you consider this girl’s story trustworthy?”

“Yes, I most certainly do. Why shouldn’t it be?
She
didn’t kill James Crandall, if that’s what you’re getting at. Quite apart from the fact that she had no motive, it’d have been a physical impossibility.”

“All right, all right. But the point is, she’s not likely to have
imagined
any of this?”

“No. She’s not the sort.”

“Excellent. And now, two questions—no, sorry, three. First, is it certain that there weren’t more than two shots fired?”

“Absolutely. Philip and Hilary and the postman and Mrs. Jordan are all agreed about that.”

“Good. And, secondly, is it certain that the rifle bullet knocked Eve out the moment it touched her?”

“Good Lord. yes. It’d be like a superhuman blow with a tiny hammer. There are cases on record—”

“Bless you, Humbleby, how didactic you’re getting… And now here’s my final question: is it certain that Hilary’s shot killed James Crandall instantaneously?”

“My dear chap, his brain was
pulped
. Of course it’s certain.”

Fen relaxed with a little sigh. “Then providing Eve’s a good witness,” he murmured, “there’s a fair chance of getting Philip and Hilary Bowyer hanged. Their motive for wanting Eve and James dead is so overwhelming that they’ll be at a disadvantage from the start, and that one little scrap of evidence ought to tip the scales against them.”

Humbleby groaned. “God give me patience,” he said meekly.
“What
little scrap of evidence? You mean that in fact they did arrange it all the way I suggested?”

“Just that. I’ve no doubt they’d been contemplating something of the sort for some time past, but of course the scheme they eventually adopted, depending as it did on Eve’s settling in the deck-chair, must have been improvisation. One of them —I presume Hilary—must have fetched the guns from the house while the other got hold of James; and they could take James to the coppice on the pretext of showing him—well, perhaps rabbit-snares: that would account for their bringing a rifle, and James doesn’t sound to me the sort of person who’d know enough about guns to realise the incongruity of a Mannlicher express model in the context of rabbits. On the other hand—”

“These are happy speculations,” said Humbleby with restraint. “But I have the idea that a moment ago you mentioned evidence. If it wouldn’t put you to too much trouble—”

“Evidence!” said Fen affably. “Yes, I was almost forgetting that. The evidence of the storm—or to be more accurate, of the storm and yourself in combination. Like so many people, you counted out the interval between the lightning flash and the thunder. Why? Because light travels faster than sound, and by gauging the interval you can gauge how far away the storm is. But there are other things, as well as light, which travel faster than sound; and one of them, as you well know, is a. bullet fired from an express rifle.

“On a hot day, sound travels at about 1,150 feet per second; but on any sort of day, over a distance of three hundred yards, a bullet from a Mannlicher rifle travels nearly three times as fast, at an average speed of about 3,000 feet per second. Therefore the shot Eve heard was not the rifle-shot at all—she
couldn’t
have heard that, since the bullet grazed her, and knocked her out, before the report of the rifle could reach her ears. But she did hear a shot—and since there were admittedly only two shots fired, the report she heard must have been the report of the automatic which killed James. In other words, the report of the automatic
preceded
the report of the rifle; which means that James was dead before the rifle was fired; which means, in turn, that it certainly wasn’t he who fired it.”

“Well, I'm damned,” said Humbleby. “What it amounts to, then, is that the Bowyers fired their two shots in the wrong order. If Eve had been killed, as they intended, that wouldn’t have mattered. But as it is—” He reached for the telephone.

“Will you be able,” Fen asked, “to get a verdict of Guilty on that evidence?”

“I think so, yes. With any luck we shall hang them.” Humbleby put the receiver to his ear. “Charge Room, please… But it’s a pity they should have had all that trouble for nothing.”

“For nothing?”

“Yes. Mrs. Jordan took the telephone message. but there was no one about to pass it on to. It was from the nursing home. of course… You see, Maurice Crandall died—leaving all his money to Eve, whose will was decidedly
not
in the Bowyers’ favour—while they were actually carrying him out to the ambulance: that is, a comfortable two hours before the shooting started. Poor dears—(yes, Betts, you can send them up now)—they never had a chance.”

The house itself was unremarkable—a small, trim brick villa built at a moderate cost some time between the wars. What was noticeable about it was its relative isolation: you expected a row of near-replicas on either side, but there were only fields, a coppice and a disused barn. “It couldn’t hardly have happened, else,” said Inspector Bledloe uninspiredly. “Not in broad daylight, anyhow.” He pushed the gate open, and with Fen at his heels entered the tidy front garden. “This,” he added laboriously, pointing, “is the scene of the occurrence.”

Fen examined the spot with the attentiveness which seemed to be required of him. There was a fence; there were bushes; there was a sundial in a circle of paving; there were the impedimenta with which the luckless housekeeper had been occupied when he was struck down—brushes, turpentine, and a messy tin, not large, of waterproof paint. But the assault and presumed robbery of two hours before had left no traces on the hard earth, not even blood. It was the flat of the spade that had knocked Church out, Fen supposed, and not the edge: lucky for him.

“You can see he didn’t have a chance to get much of his painting done.” Bledloe indicated the fence, on which the undried area was certainly diminutive, and the almost brim-full paint-tin; he nudged the tin illustratively with the toe of his boot, and a fragmentary green ellipse became visible on the paving-stone where it had rested. “So the way I work it out is this. We know it was twenty past three when he fetched the paint from the scullery—”

“That’s the evidence of the housekeeper, is it?”

“The evidence of the housekeeper
and
her lady-friend she was gossiping with. Which means—judging from the amount of painting he got done—that he must have been attacked round about half past. He wasn’t actually
found,
of course, till after four.”

Fen nodded. “Yes, I’d been meaning to ask you about that. Was it the housekeeper who found him?”

“No. It was a family party out for a walk.” Bledloe grimaced. “Five of them, including kids, so you needn’t waste your energy suspecting
them.
One of the kids saw his shoe sticking out from behind a bush, that’s the way it was. And then, as to the nephew—”

“Nephew?” said Fen rather testily. “This is the first time you’ve mentioned any nephew.
Church’s
nephew, you mean?”

“Yes. Didn’t I tell you about him? Merrick, his name is—George Merrick. He came here soon after lunch to visit Church, and—”

“And left when?”

“Ah. That’s one of the things I’m not sure of. You see, the housekeeper and her lady-friend, they were out in the back garden till a quarter past three, so they didn’t hear him go. The only thing was, they naturally assumed he’d left because of Church fetching that paint from the scullery at twenty past, just after they’d come back in to make a cup of tea.”

“Yes, I see. The two women didn’t hear Church talking to anyone, then?”

“No. They heard the front door open and shut when he came out here with his paint, and that was all.”