Fen Country

Wakefield was attending a series of philosophy lectures at London University, and for the past ten minutes his fellow-guests at Haldane’s had been mutely enduring a
précis
of the lecturer’s main contentions.

“What it amounts to, then,” said Wakefield, toward what they hoped was the close of what they hoped was his peroration; “is that philosophy deals not so much with the answers to questions about Man and the Universe as with the problem of
what questions may properly be asked.
Improper questions”—here a little man named Fielding, whom no one knew very well, choked suddenly over his port and had to be led out—“improper questions can only confuse the issue. And it’s this aspect of philosophy which in my opinion defines its superiority to other studies, such as—such as”—Wakefield’s eye lighted on Gervase Fen, who was stolidly cracking walnuts opposite—“such as, well, criminology, for instance.”

Fen roused himself.

“Improper questions,” he said reflectively. “l remember a case which illustrates, very clearly how—”

“Defines,” Wakefield repeated at a higher pitch, “its superiority to—”

But at this point, Haldane, perceiving that much more of Wakefield on epistemology would certainly bring the party to a premature end, contrived adroitly to upset his port into Wakefield’s lap, and in the mélée which ensued it proved possible to detach the conversational initiative from Wakefield and confer it on Fen.

“Who killed Baker?”
 With this rather abrupt query Fen established a foothold while Wakefield was still scrubbing ineffectually at his damp trousers with a handkerchief. “The situation which resulted in Baker’s death wasn’t in itself specially complicated or obscure, and in consequence the case was solved readily enough.”

“Yes, it would be, of course,” said Wakefield sourly, “if you were solving it.”

“Oh, but I wasn’t.” Fen shook his head decisively, and Wakefield, shifting about uncomfortably in the effort to remove wet barathea from contact with his skin, glowered at him. “The case was solved by a very able Detective Inspector of the County CID, by name Casby, and it was from him that I heard of it, quite recently, while we were investigating the death of that Swiss schoolmaster at Cotten Abbas. As nearly as I can, l’ll tell it to you the way he told me. And I ought to warn you in advance that it’s a case in which the mode of telling is important—as important, probably, as the thing told…

“At the time of his death Baker was about forty-five, a self-important little man with very black, heavily brilliantined hair, an incipient paunch, dandified clothes, and a twisted bruiser’s nose which was the consequence not of pugnacity but of a fall from a bicycle in youth. He was not, one gathers, at all a pleasing personality, and he had crowned his dislikable qualities by marrying, and subsequently bullying, a wife very much younger and more attractive than himself. For a.reason which the sequel will make obvious, there’s not much evidence as to the form this bullying took, but it was real enough—no question about that—and three years of it drove the wretched woman, more for consolation than for passion, into the arms of the chauffeur, a gloomy, sallow young man named Arnold Snow. Since Snow had never read D. H. Lawrence, his chief emotion in the face of Mary Baker’s advances was simple surprise, and to do him justice, he seems never to have made the smallest attempt to capitalize his position in any of the obvious ways. But, of course, the neighbors talked; there are precedents enough for such a relationship’s ending in disaster.”

Haldane nodded. “Rattenbury,” he suggested, “and Stoner.”

“That sort of thing, yes. It wasn’t a very sensible course for Mary Baker to adopt, the more so as for religious reasons she had a real horror of divorce. But she was one of those warm, good-natured, muddleheaded women—not, in temperament, unlike Mrs. Rattenbury—to whom a man’s affection is overwhelmingly necessary, as much for emotional as for physical 5 reasons; and three years of Baker had starved that side of her so effectively that when she did break out, she broke out with a vengeance. I’ve seen a photograph of her, and can tell you that she was rather a big woman (though not fat), as dark as her husband or her lover, with a large mouth and eyes, and a Rubensish figure. Why she married Baker in the first place I really can’t make out. He was well-to-do—or, anyway, seemed so—but Mary was the sort of woman to whom money quite genuinely means nothing; and oddly enough, Snow seems to have been as indifferent to it as she.

“Baker was a manufacturer. His factory just outside Twelford made expensive model toys—ships, airplanes, cars, and so forth. The demand for such things is strictly limited—people who know the value of money very properly hesitate before spending fifteen guineas on a toy which their issue are liable to sit on, or drop into a pond, an hour later—and when Philip Eckerson built a factory in Ruislip for producing the same sort of thing, only more cheaply, Baker’s profits dropped with some abruptness to rather less than half what they’d been before. So for five years there was a price-war—a price-war beneficial to the country’s nurseries, but ruinous to Baker and Eckerson alike. When eventually they met, to arrange a merger, both of them were close to bankruptcy.

“It was on 10 March of this year they met—not on neutral territory, but in Baker’s house at Twelford, where Eckerson was to stay the night. Eckerson was an albino, which is uncommon, but apart from that the only remarkable thing about him was obstinacy, and since he confined this trait to business, the impression he made on Mary Baker during his visit to her house was in every respect colorless. She was aware, in a vague, general way, that he was her husband’s business rival, but she bore him not the least malice on that account; and as to Snow, the mysteries of finance were beyond him, and from first to last he never understood how close to the rocks his employer’s affairs had drifted. In any case, neither he nor Mary Baker had much attention to spare for Eckerson, because an hour or two before Eckerson arrived Baker summoned the pair of them to his study, informed them that he knew of their liaison, and stated that he would take steps immediately to obtain a divorce.

“It’s doubtful, I think, if he really intended to do anything of the kind. He didn’t sack Snow, he didn’t order his wife out of the house, and apparently he had no intention of leaving the house himself—all of which would amount, in law, to condoning his wife’s adultery and nullifying the suit. No, he was playing cat-and-mouse, that was all; he knew his wife’s horror of divorce, and wished quite simply to make her miserable for as long as the pretense of proceedings could be kept up; but neither Mary nor Snow had the wit to see that he was duping them for his own pleasure, and they assumed in consequence that he meant every word he said. Mary became hysterical—in which condition she confided her obsession about divorce to Snow. And Snow, a remarkably naive and impressionable young man, took it all
au grand sérieux.
He had not, up to now, displayed any notable animus against Baker, but Mary’s terror and wretchedness fanned hidden fires, and from then on he was implacable. They were a rather pitiful pair, these two young people cornered by an essentially rather trivial issue, but their very ignorance made them dangerous, and if Baker had had more sense he’d never have played such an imbecile trick on them. Psychologically, he was certainly in a morbid condition, for apparently he was prepared to let the relationship go on, provided he could indulge his sadistic instincts in this weird and preposterous fashion. What the end of it all would have been, if death hadn’t intervened, one doesn’t, of course, know.

“Well, in due course Eckerson arrived, and Mary entertained him as well as her emotional condition would allow, and he sat up with Baker till the small hours, talking business. The two men antagonized one another from the start; and the more they talked, the more remote did the prospect of a merger become, until in the latter stages all hope of it vanished, and they went to their beds on the very worst of terms, with nothing better to look forward to than an extension of their present cut-throat competition, and eventual ruin. You’d imagine that self-interest would be strong enough, in a case like that, to compel them to some sort of agreement, but it wasn’t—and of course the truth of the matter is that each was hoping that, if competition continued, the other would crack first, leaving a clear field. So they parted on the landing with mutual, and barely concealed, ill-will; and the house slept.

“The body was discovered shortly after nine next morning, and the discoverer was Mrs. Blaine, the cook. Unlike Snow, who lived in, Mrs. Blaine had a bed-sitting-room in the town; and it was as she was making her way round to the back door of Baker’s house, to embark on the day’s duties, that she glanced in at the drawing-room window and saw the gruesome object which lay in shadow on the hearthrug. Incidentally, you mustn’t waste any of your energy suspecting Mrs. Blaine of the murder; I can assure you she had nothing to do with it, and I can assure you, too, that her evidence, for what little it ordinary thief, Casby argued, would scarcely give a Chinese miniature a second glance, let alone remove it. No, the burglary was bogus; and unless you postulated an implausibly sophisticated double-bluff, then the murder had been done by one of the three people sleeping in the house. As to motive—well, you know all about that already; and one way and another it didn’t take Inspector Casby more than twenty-four hours to make his arrest.”

Somewhat grudgingly, Fen relinquished the walnuts and applied himself to stuffed dates instead. His mouth full, he looked at the company expectantly; and with equal expectancy the company looked back at him. It was Wakefield who broke the silence.

“But that can’t be
all,”
he protested.

“Certainly it’s all,” said Fen. “I’ve told you the story as Inspector Casby told it to me, and I now repeat the question he asked me at the end of it—and which I was able to answer, by the way:
Who killed Baker?”

Wakefield stared mistrustfully. “You’ve left something out.”

“Nothing, I assure you. If anything, I’ve been rather more generous with clues than Inspector Casby was. But if you still have no idea who killed Baker, I’ll give you another hint: he died at 9 a.m. Does that help?”

They thought about this. Apparently it didn’t help in the least.

“All right,” Wakefield said sulkily at last. “We give up. Who killed Baker?”

And Fen replied blandly, “The public executioner killed him—after he had been tried and convicted for the murder of Eckerson.”

For a moment Wakefield sat like one stupefied; then he emitted a howl of rage. “Unfair!” he shouted, banging on the table. “Trickery!”

“Not at all.” Fen was unperturbed. “It’s a trick story, admittedly, but you were given ample warning of that. It arose out of a discussion about the propriety of asking certain questions; and there was only one question—Who killed Baker?—which I asked. What’s more, I emphasized at the outset that the mode of telling was as important as the thing told.

“But quite apart from all that, you had your clue. Mrs. Blaine, looking in through a window at a figure lying in shadow, concluded that violence had been done for the reason that she saw blood on the hair. Now that blood, as I mentioned, was dark venous blood; and I mentioned also that Baker had black, heavily brilliantined hair. Is it conceivable that dark blood would be
visible
 on such hair—visible, that is, when the body was in shadow and the observer outside the window of the room in which it lay? Of course not. Therefore, the body was not Baker’s. But it couldn’t have been Mary Baker’s, or Snow’s, since they too were black-haired—and that leaves only Eckerson. Eckerson was an albino, which means that his hair was white; and splotches of blood would show up on white hair all right—even though it was in shadow, and Mrs. Blaine some distance away. Who, then, would want to kill Eckerson? Baker, obviously, and Baker alone—I emphasized that both Snow and Mary were quite indifferent to the visitor. And who, after the arrest, would be likely to kill (notice, please, that I never at any time said ‘murder’) Baker? There’s only one possible answer to that…”

“And what happened to the wife?” Haldane asked. “Did she marry Snow?”

“No. He melted,” said Fen complacently, “away. She married someone else, though, and according to Inspector Casby is very happy now. Baker’s and Eckerson’s businesses both collapsed under heavy debts, and no longer exist.”

There was a pause; then: “The nature of existence,” said Wakefield suddenly, “has troubled philosophers in all ages. What are the sensory and mental processes which cause us to assert that this table, for instance, is
real?
The answer given by the subjective idealists—”

“Will have to wait,” said Haldane firmly, “till we meet again.” He pushed back his chair. “Let’s go and see what the women are up to, shall we?”

The woman who opened the door of the cottage to George Gotobed’s knock was big-boned, active-looking, tubular-shaped: somewhere in the late fifties or early sixties, with a booming voice.