Fen Country (7 page)

Bradbury’s voice trailed away; then with more energy he said: “Look, Gervase, I don’t see how all this stuff about Marion—”

“Stop grumbling,” said Fen peevishly. “What I was wondering, you see, was whether…” And at that he too broke off, so that again the silence stretched between them. Bradbury noted, however, that his ex-tutor’s lean and ruddy countenance no longer wore its look of distressing blankness; it was alert now, and grew more so momently as Bradbury watched…

“Christopher,” said Fen abruptly. “Do you want my advice?”

“What would that be?”

“My advice,” said Fen,”is that you go to Mr. Anderson and ask him to tell you, in confidence, if there wasn’t something a bit odd about that telephone in the house he rented.”

Bradbury stared.
“Odd?”
he echoed. “There was no extension, if that’s what you mean—”

“No, no.”

“And if by any chance you’re thinking that the instrument itself can have had some sort of a dictaphone hidden inside it, I can assure you, most earnestly—”

“Don’t
argue,
Christopher,” Fen interrupted him. “Just go away and do as I say.”

So Bradbury looked at him again; and thereupon ceased to argue, and went away and did as he said.

And certainly it was a transfigured American who returned to Fen’s rooms the following evening.

“Sherlock does it again!” he crowed inanely. “The deductions of the great man proved beyond question that—”

“Not deductions,” said Fen with some rancor. “Intelligent guess-work—nothing more.” He is fond of compliments, but likes accuracy even better. “Have a drink and tell me about it.”

“Well, here’s how it must have happened,” said Bradbury as soon as he was supplied. “Our—our opponents, let’s call them, get hold of my uncle and suggest that information he can give them about my activities will be well paid for. Since I myself have been keeping that possibility firmly in mind, he isn’t too hopeful.

“But then his friends the Andersons come down to the neighborhood to stay. Pa and Ma are on hot bricks because daughter Marion has fallen for a jerk. They daren’t thwart her openly; but they know said jerk has promised to telephone Marion every evening while she’s away.

“So when clever old Mr. Darling suggests that they put a wrong telephone number—
his
number—on to the instrument in the house they’ve rented, they think that’s just fine: Marion will give the transferred number to the boy-friend; the boy-friend will phone Mr. Darling—thinking it’s the Anderson house; and Mr. Darling, representing himself as a friend of the family who’s on Marion’s side, will tell him that Marion’s ill, but will get in touch with him later, and also that he’s not to write, because with Marion confined to bed there’s a chance his letters will be intercepted and withheld.

“The boy-friend will believe all this: ‘Marion’s nuts about me,’ he’ll tell himself if she
weren’t
ill, she’d certainly be hanging around the phone waiting for me to call—so this literally
can’t
be just a trick to choke me off.’ But meanwhile, of course, Marion will be wondering why the heck she’s not hearing from him—and she can’t write him or phone him herself, because he’s a commercial traveler moving around the country all the time, and.she doesn’t know where he’ll be. So maybe, with any luck, she’ll decide he’s neglecting her badly, and react accordingly. Even if she does subsequently meet him again, his explanations, when you come to think of it, are going to sound very, very fishy indeed…

“But of course, it isn’t Marion’s welfare that clever old Mr. Darling has chiefly in mind: what interests him about the set-up is the possibility of tripping
me
—because so long as I have any private long-distance calls to make, the Anderson house is the likeliest place for me to go.

“And I fall for it. So help me, the one thing no one ever questions is the number set into the dial of a phone. Naturally I gave it to the exchange when they had to call me back so that when the connection was made, the house they actually called was my uncle’s. He imitated my voice—he’d been expecting something—”

“No password?” Fen interposed rather brusquely.

“What? Password? Hell, no, The Washington number I called was password enough in itself: any unauthorized person capable of worming
that
number out of me would be quite capable of worming out a couple dozen passwords as well…

“Where was I? Yeah, well, the rest’s obvious, I guess. My uncle imitates me in talking to the boss in Washington; then he rings the real number of the Anderson house and imitates the boss in talking to me. Circle complete.”

“H’m,” said Fen. “Your uncle was taking a good fat risk, though.”

“Old buzzard!” And Bradbury scowled ferociously. “But no, there couldn’t be any serious risk. Not for him. He was dying, you see, and knew it. The only thing was, he’d run through all his money…

“And clever old Mr. Darling wasn’t going to any pauper’s grave so long as he had a nephew, and a man’s life, and a country to sell.”

Detective Inspector Humbleby, of New Scotland Yard, had been induced by his wife to spend the first week of his summer’s leave with his wife’s sister, and his wife’s sister’s husband, in Munsingham, and was correspondingly aggrieved.

Munsingham, large and sooty, seemed to him not at all the place for recreation and jollity; moreover, his wife’s sister’s husband, by name Pollitt, was, like himself, a policeman, being superintendent of the Munsingham City CID, so that inevitably shop would be talked.

On the second day of the visit, however, Humbleby’s grievances were erased from his mind by the revelation of a serious crisis in his brother-in-law’s affairs.

“I’m going to be retired,” said Pollitt abruptly that evening, over tankards in the pub. “I haven’t got round to telling Marion about it yet.”

Humbleby was staring at him in amazement. “Retired? But you’re not nearly at retirement age yet. Why on earth—”

“Because I’ve got across the chief constable,” said Pollitt. “He wanted a case to be considered closed—with perfectly good reason, I must say—and I wanted it kept open. I did keep it open, too, for a week or so—against his orders. Several of my men were tied up with it when they ought to have been doing other things.

“I didn’t have the least excuse. I was going on instinct, and the fact that a couple of witnesses were just a bit too consistent in their stories to be true… If I
did
possess definite evidence that the facts in this case aren’t what they seem, I could put it up to the Watch Committee, and I’m pretty sure they’d uphold me. In fact, it wouldn’t come to that; the CC’d withdraw. But definite evidence is just what’s lacking—so…” And Pollitt shrugged resignedly.

“M’m,” said Humbleby. “Just what is this case?”

“Well, if you don’t mind coming along to my office tomorrow morning, and having a look at the dossier…”

And the basic facts of the case, Humbleby found, were in themselves simple enough.

A month previously, on 27 June, between 10:30 and 11:00 in the morning (the evidence as to these times being positive and irrefragable), a fifty-year-old woman, a Mrs. Whittington, had been murdered in the kitchen of her home on the outskirts of the town.

The weapon—a heavy iron poker, with which Mrs. Whittington had been struck violently on the back of the head—was found, wiped clean of fingerprints, near by. The back door was open, and it was evident that the murder had followed, or been followed by, a certain amount of pilfering.

Mrs. Whittington’s husband, Leslie Whittington, a man younger and a good deal better-looking than his wife, held the post of chief engineer in the machine-tool manufacturing firm of Heathers and Bardgett, whose factory was some ten minutes’ walk from the Whittington home.

On the morning in question Whittington had been, as usual on weekdays, in his office at the factory. And the only respect in which, from his point of view, this particular morning had differed from any other was that he had been visited by a reporter, a girl, who worked for the most important of the Munsingham local newspapers. This girl, by name Sheila Pratt, was doing a series on the managers and technicians of Munsingham industry, and Whittington, an important man in his line, represented her current assignment.

She had arrived at Whinington’s office shortly before 10:30 and had left again three-quarters of an hour later. During this period Whittington’s secretary had, on Whittington’s own instructions, told callers, and people who telephoned, that Whittington was out, thereby ensuring that the interview remained undisturbed.

Moreover, there was a fire-escape running down past Whittington’s office window to a little-frequented yard.

As a matter of course, Pollitt had set in train the routine of investigating whether some previous association could have existed between Whittington and Sheila Pratt. Their own assertion was that until the interview they had been complete strangers to one another; but Mrs. Whittington, Pollitt had learned, was not the divorcing sort—and the pilfering could easily have been a blind.

Before any results could be obtained from this investigation, however, there had occurred that development which had resulted in the chief constable’s ordering the file on the case to be closed. Two days after the murder, a notorious young thug called Miller was run over and killed by a lorry on the by-pass road, and in his pocket were found several small pieces of jewelry looted from Mrs. Whittington’s bedroom at the time of her death.

“There were witnesses, too,” said Pollitt, “who’d seen Miller hanging about near the Whittington house on the morning Mrs. W was done in. So it was reasonable enough to put the blame on him, and just leave it at that. Of course, Miller could quite well have come along and pinched the stuff
after
the murder was committed, but the CC thought that in the absence of any evidence against the husband that was stretching it a bit far, and one sees his point of view.”

“One does,’ Humbleby agreed. “And I must admit, Charlie, that at the moment I still don’t quite see yours.”

“I know, I know,” said Pollitt, disgruntled. “But I still maintain that those two—Whittington and the Pratt girl—had their story far too pat. I took them both through it several times—separately, and with all sorts of camouflage stuff about unimportant detail—and neither of them ever put a foot wrong. Look.” He thrust a sheaf of typescript at Humbleby. “Here are their various statements.
You
have a look at them.”

“M’m,” said Humbleby, nearly an hour later. “Yes… Look, Charlie, the girl’s statements all contain stuff about the camera she brought with her to the interview. ‘Tripod… three seconds’ exposure’—all that. Do you happen to have copies of the pictures she took?”

“She only kept one,” said Pollitt. “But I’ve got a blow-up print of that, all right.” He produced it and handed it across. “It’s a good picture, isn’t it?”

It was unusually sharp and clear, showing Whittington at his desk with the desk clock very properly registering ten minutes to eleven.

“But there’s nothing in it that’s any help, that I can see,” Pollitt went on. “The clothes are right. The—”

“Just a minute,” Humbleby interrupted sharply. He had reverted from the photograph to the signed statements of Sheila Pratt, and was frowning in perplexity. “It’s possible that—I say, Charlie, is this girl an experienced photographer—a professional, I mean?”

Pollitt shook his head. “No, she’s just a beginner. I understand she’s only bought her camera quite recently. But why—”

“And this factory,” said Humbleby. “Is there a lot of heavy machinery? A lot of noise and vibration?”

“Yes, there is. What are you getting at?”

“A couple more questions and you’ll see it for yourself. Is Whittington’s office somewhere
over
the factory? Can you feel the vibration
there?”

“You can. But I still don’t understand—”

“You will, Charlie. Because here’s the really critical query.
Were those machines running continuously during the whole of the time Sheila Pratt was in Whittington’s office?”

‘And with that, Pollitt realized. “Tripod,” he muttered. Then his voice rose. “Time-exposure… Wait.” He grabbed the telephone, asked for a number, asked for a name, put his question, listened, thanked his informant, and rang off. “Yes, they were running,” he said triumphantly. “They were running all right.”

And Humbleby chuckled. He flicked the photograph with his forefinger. “So that very obviously this beautifully clear picture wasn’t taken at the time when Sheila Pratt and Whittington allege it was taken—because tripod plus time-exposure plus vibration would inevitably have resulted in blurring… I imagine they must have faked it up one evening, after the factory had stopped work; and the girl was too inexperienced in photography to realize the difference that that would make in the finished product…

“Well, Charlie, will your chief like it, do you think?”

Pollitt grinned. “He won’t like it at all. But give the devil his due, he’ll swallow it all right.” He hesitated. “So that solves my own personal problem— and I needn’t tell you how grateful I am… But as to whether we can get a prosecution out of it—”

They never did. “And really, it was a good thing,” said Pollitt two years later in London, when he and his wife were returning the Humblebys’ visit, and the conversation had turned to the topic of Whittington and his fate. “Because if the DPP had allowed it to be taken to court, the chances are he’d have been acquitted in spite of the lies and in spite of the information we dug out about the surreptitious meetings between him and the Pratt girl in the eighteen months before the murder.

“And if he
had
been acquitted—well, he wouldn’t have needed to worry about the possibility of his new wife giving him away, would he? And he wouldn’t have set about stopping her mouth in that clumsy, panicky fashion…

“And they wouldn’t be hanging him for it at Pentonville at nine o’clock tomorrow morning… What a bit of luck, eh?”

“I’ve heard from the ballistics people,” said Superintendent MacCutcheon, “and they tell me there’s no doubt whatever that the bullet was fired from Ellingham’s gun. Is that what you yourself were expecting?”