Beware of the Trains (14 page)

“George Munsey’s two daughters were both good-looking; but if I’d had to choose between them, I think I should have chosen Judith rather than Eleanor. Eleanor had the more dizzying figure of the two, but that, of course, is only a
relative
judgment: Judith’s figure, though without the heroic mouth-drying splendour of her sister’s, was still capable of making the average girl look as if she’d been hammered out of a milk-churn, and in addition to that her
features
were more beautiful than Eleanor’s. I’m sorry to be talking about nothing but externals; the trouble is that I didn’t then, and don’t now, really know much about the two girls’ characters—other, I mean, than such obvious facts as that Judith was noisy while Eleanor was quiet, and that Judith was energetic while Eleanor was lazy. There were three years between them—Judith, at twenty-two, being the younger; Judith was fair while Eleanor was dark; and Eleanor dressed better than Judith. None of which is very vivid, I’m afraid—but then, healthy, attractive young women
aren’t
very vivid, except in the flesh.

“‘Aha!’ said Judith from the doorway. ‘The Great Man-hunter in person, how nice to see you again, I didn’t have so much
embonpoint
when you were here last do you think it’s improved me, oh look let me take your things, I’m sorry everyone’s making that God-awful row but they’re playing Racing Demon, how long are you going to stay, come on in.’

“So I went on in.

“I ought to explain, at this point, that the Munseys were a well-to-do family, since Mrs. Munsey and Judith and Eleanor had all inherited substantially from Mrs. Munsey’s father, who had owned flour-mills. They kept no servants, however, preferring on the whole, to lead a mildly Bohemian existence, looking after themselves. For some reason, they had never quite grasped the practical advantages, in a household, of the principle known to economists as Division of Labour, and when anything had to be done they tended all of them to try and do it simultaneously, frequently with disastrous results. But the atmosphere of their house was very friendly, and the shouts of irate laughter from the drawing-room were so characteristic of it that for a moment time was telescoped, and it seemed a matter of hours rather than of years since I’d been there last.

“‘Me,’ said Judith, ‘I’m Doing Something In The Kitchen and you’d better not ask what it is because you’ll probably have to eat it later on, and now just dump your bags, and that other thing oh it’s a typewriter isn’t it,
here
and come and meet everyone, we’re stuck with Aunt Ellen these days did you know, I really can’t
bear
the woman’—this with a sudden access of genuine feeling which rather startled me—‘but the others don‘t seem to mind her so it’s hopeless to try and turn her out, if she’d only accept
money
instead of battening on us
here
I shouldn’t mind so much, but look at her now, she’s upstairs slaving away at a lot of rubbishy embroidery which she can’t do for nuts in the hope that someone’ll pay her a few shillings for it, and God knows I’d be willing to finance her myself if only she’d go
away
, you remember her don’t you?’

“I did remember her. George Munsey’s sister Ellen was one of those desperately willing, desperately inefficient middle-aged women whom one associates with the Women’s Voluntary Services and an atmosphere of utter confusion: short-sighted eyes, wispy greying hair, and a walk like a cripple in a hurry. Her poverty, which was genuine enough, could, as Judith remarked, have been remedied easily out of the family resources if only she had not been obstinate about receiving direct help; as it was, she lodged with them free of charge, a situation which all of them except Judith endured very patiently; and Judith’s dislike of her hadn’t, I think, any rational basis, but was more in the nature of a violent temperamental aversion such as does sometimes crop up between dissimilar personalities. Aunt Ellen didn’t reciprocate it, by the way: if anything, she was rather fonder of Judith than of the others.

“I didn’t, of course, take all of this in straight away; most of it emerged during conversation over the cards—and it was to the cards that Judith conducted me as soon as I’d deposited my things. There were four of them playing: George Munsey, his wife Dorothy, his eldest daughter Eleanor, and a young man who was a stranger to me, but who I gathered was occupying the second spare-bedroom. He had the sort of looks which people describe as ‘over-handsome’; his thick, curly, jet-black hair was heavily oiled; he chewed gum; and he was manifestly vain—though the vanity was too naive to give serious offence, and it was relieved on occasion by a queer, earnest, dog-like, rather touching humility. Physically he was splendid. ‘This is Philip,’ said Judith, introducing him. ‘In full, Philip Odell. His specialty’—here a glint of malice appeared in Judith’s eye—‘his specialty is changing horses, or perhaps I should say mares, in mid-stream.’

“‘Judith,’ said Mrs. Munsey reproachfully. ‘The image is hardly—hardly—’ But reproof tailed away into benevolence. Dorothy Munsey, vague, stately and benign, who had acquired something of a reputation as a poetess in the earlier twenties and lost it again, conclusively, in the later, was temperamentally incapable of rebuking anyone, and it was a wonder her daughters had grown up as unspoiled as they were. ‘What Judith
means
, Professor Fen—’

“‘Is that I,’ said Odell, ‘have not been behaving like the perfect gentleman.’ His hearty tones didn’t quite conceal his uneasiness, I thought. ‘The fact is, sir,’ he went on, that for a time I was engaged to Judith. But of course, she couldn’t stand me’—he showed very white teeth in a not altogether convincing laugh—‘not for long, anyway. So that when Eleanor decided
she
could stand me, I got engaged to Eleanor. And there, as they say, the matter rests.’

“‘He felt,’ Eleanor put in, ‘that it ought to be kept in the family. And since apart from Aunt Ellen I was the only other unattached female to be had—’

“‘Now, darling, you know very well I adore—’ Odell checked himself abruptly. ‘Hell,’ he said. ‘Why wasn’t I brought up properly?’ He grimaced. ‘It’s the gigolo in me,’ he added ruefully, ‘that makes me want to gush in public.
I’m
sorry.’

“And somehow I liked him for that.

“I learned later that he was the owner of a chain of milk bars in the West End; and although clearly he was passionately interested in them, he took the Munseys’ gentle mockery on the subject in really very good part. I also gathered, indirectly, that in spite of what he’d said it was he rather than Judith who had been primarily responsible for the breaking-off of the first engagement. However, neither he nor Judith nor Eleanor seemed much discomfited by the exchange, and until the next day I wasn’t in the least aware of anything’s being amiss in the house at all.

“In the meantime, we played cards.

“l myself ought to have been working; but I nave a fondness for Racing Demon, so when Judith had gone back to the kitchen I joined the game, and the five of us played uninterruptedly for the next two hours—George Munsey with gusts of helpless laughter at his own inefficacy, Eleanor lazily, Odell with great seriousness, and Mrs. Munsey with her usual stately vagueness; so that it was always surprising when, as generally happened, Mrs. Munsey came out on top. At half past four, on the Munseys’ departing in a body to make tea, I retrieved my new typewriter and settled down in the library to work. And there I stayed—recruited by food and drink which the family brought in to me at irregular intervals—until nearly midnight. I hadn’t any occasion to leave the library, so I’ve no idea what the others did with themselves; and I don’t remember that anything more eventful happened to me, during the remainder of the day, than having to put a new ribbon into my machine. By the time I’d finished my job they’d all gone to bed, and I wasn’t at all sorry to follow them.

“But next morning. Odell being not yet up and the others unitedly engaged in cooking breakfast, Judith took me aside and confided to me certain matters which I must confess disturbed me a good deal.”

Fen leaned back, staring rather blankly at the roses in the centre of the dinner-table. “We went down the garden,” he said, “so as to keep out of people’s way. There was a ramshackle tool-shed, I remember. and a few spiky cabbages, and dust on all the grass; and we could hear the clatter of plates from the kitchen. Judith, in slacks and a sweater, was unusually subdued: her conversation had some full stops in it for once. And the reason soon appeared.

“‘I—I don’t know whether I ought to be telling you this,’ she said. ‘But it’s so like a Providence, you actually being here… Look, you’re not officially connected with the police, are you?’

“‘No.’

“‘I mean, anything I told you, you wouldn’t have to pass it on to them?’

“‘No, of course not,‘ I said uneasily. ‘But—’

“‘It’s about Philip, you see. Philip Odell. I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s his real—Well, but never mind that. The point is. you see, that last night something
happened.’

“‘What sort of thing?’

“‘It—I say, you
will
keep this to yourself, won’t you? It’s something rather horrible, you see, and I— Oh, damn, I’m havering—Well, anyway, here goes.’

“And then it all came pouring out. Summarised—for conciseness’ and Wakefield’s sake—what it amounted to was this:

“Judith had heard me come up to bed at midnight, and having finished her book, and being still sleepless, had set of, as soon as the closing of the bedroom door signalled me out of the way (since in spite of her talk she was quite a modest child, and apparently had very little on), to fetch a magazine from the hall. Arriving at the head of the stairs, however, she had looked down and seen Odell slip quietly out of the drawing-room—where they’d left him chewing gum and playing dice with himself—and into the library; from which shortly afterwards she heard the rattle of my typewriter, which I’d left down there. In the normal way she wouldn’t have thought much about this, but Odell’s manner had struck her as distinctly furtive, and she was curious to know what he was up to. She hid in the hall cloaks closet, therefore, until after about ten minutes Odell emerged, still stealthily, and crept up to his room. Then she went into the library to see if she could find any indication of what he’d been doing there. Well, she did in fact find something, and in due course showed it to me, and—”

Fen broke off rather abruptly; and when after a moment he resumed, it was to say:

“You know that when you’re using thin typing-paper you generally put a backing-sheet behind the sheet you’re actually typing on?”

Haldane nodded. “Yes, I know.”

“That’s what Odell had done. And he’d left the backing-sheet in the waste-paper basket. And you could read what he’d typed by the indentations on it. And what he’d typed was not in the least pleasant.”

Fen paused to refill his glass. “As I recall it,” he continued after drinking, “the message ran like this:
‘You remember what happened at Manchester on December 4th, 1945? So do I. But a thousand pounds might persuade me, I think, to forget about it. I’ll write again and tell you where to leave the money. It will be the worse for you if you try to find out who I am.’”

Haldane nodded again. “Blackmail,” he murmured thoughtfully.

“Quite so. Odell was the sort of person who might well be unscrupulous enough to try that particular game; and the Munseys—Aunt Ellen apart—were a good rich mine for that kind of mining: I don’t mean in the sense of their having dubious pasts, of course, but rather in the sense that each one of them was well off
independently of the others.
It all seemed plain enough—and yet somehow it was a bit too plain; and I got the impression that even Judith, distressed as she was, had inexplicit doubts about it. Besides, there was an odd thing about the message on that tell-tale backing-sheet, and that was its heading.”

“Its
heading?”

“Yes. At the top of it there were four additional words typed:
‘The—quick—brown—fox.’”

There was an instant’s bemused silence. Someone said: “What on earth… ?”

“Yes. A little mystifying, I agree. But anyway, there it was—and there too, more importantly, was the impress of the blackmail note. And if in fact, despite Judith’s and my misty doubts, Odell
was
blackmailing someone in the house, then the situation required very delicate handling indeed. Judith wanted my advice, naturally enough” (“Tcha,” said Wakefield) “as to what she ought to do. But I never had a chance to give it her, because it was at that point in our conversation that we heard Eleanor’s scream. Eleanor had gone to call her
fiancé
down to his breakfast, and had found him murdered in his bed.

“Well, the police came, and the Ministry awaited me vainly, and as soon as the routine of the investigation was over, Superintendent Yolland took me into consultation. I was glad to get away from the family, I can tell you. Odell’s death had plainly strengthened the hypothesis that he was blackmailing one of them—that he had slipped the blackmail note under a certain door on his way to bed, I mean, and that the occupant of that room had guessed the blackmailer’s identity and decided to kill rather than pay; and I was finding it difficult to look any of the Munseys in the eye. Eleanor was in a state of hysterics; George Munsey was as fathomlessly miserable as only a normally jovial man can be; his wife’s usual vagueness had grown monstrously, so that she scarcely seemed to be present in the spirit at all; and Aunt Ellen’s well-meant efforts to be helpful were really, in the circumstances, quite exceptionally trying. Judith stayed outwardly more or less normal; but although she said nothing further to me about the subject of our conversation in the garden, I could see that in spite of her apparent self-possession she was horribly afraid.

“Yolland proved to be a Devonshire man transplanted to London: slow, thorough and by no means unintelligent. But the facts he had to offer weren’t at all enlightening. Odell had been killed, while sound asleep, by a single blow on the forehead. The weapon was a heavy brass poker from the drawing-room, and no great strength would have been needed to wield it effectively. Death had occurred between five and six a.m. and had been instantaneous. There were no fingerprints, and no helpful traces of any kind.