Case with No Conclusion (24 page)

When, some three or four days later, a letter arrived from Beef, I opened it sceptically. Beef would not be likely to write unless there was some new “development,” and I had lost faith in developments. I felt bitterly that the continued optimism of the Sergeant was now a very shabby cloak to hide his inefficiency.

The letter was written from his house in Lilac Crescent and dated the previous day.

D
EAR
T. (it said),

I had an interview yesterday with Sir William Petterie. I might say that he realizes better than some others I could mention the value of my work in this case, and he has decided to appeal. I still feel that Justice may win. I think you ought to have been here to have come to that interview as it may turn out to be an important part of the case.

Yours truly,

W. B
EEF.

What case? I said to myself, studying his large scrawl. There was no case. So far as I was concerned, the past weeks had been a ghastly waste of time, for quite obviously there was no story for me to write. One couldn't write a detective novel in which one's pet detective had believed the wrong man to be innocent, and failed to find the guilty party.

I had no hopes whatever of the appeal, and did not take the trouble to find out on what grounds it was based. Petterie's only hope, I felt, would be if there had been some technical breach, or if the judge could be thought to have summed up unfairly. As Seebright's summary had been a dispassionate and concise affair, and the trial had been conducted with (as it seemed to me) exemplary forbearance, I could not build much hope on this. No, I had to face it. Beef had failed, and I had failed with him. I should have to look round now for some other private investigator whose exploits would furnish me with material for novels, and who would not let me down in this humiliating way. I
regretted Beef because his personality enabled me to exercise that facetiousness which I believe is my forte, but I realized that I must cut my losses on him.

I had heard stories of an elderly clergyman in Worcestershire who had done some remarkable work, and seemed to have a personality fitted to this kind of fiction. He apparently never left his booklined study, but, puffing gently at his meerschaum pipe, elucidated problems which were baffling the police of two continents. Perhaps, I thought, I could constitute myself his Boswell, if someone had not already found him. Belonging to a highly specialized profession—that of a private investigator's private crime writer—I realized that I might have some difficulty in finding another situation for myself. But it was obviously quite useless to continue with Beef. Stewart would be hanged, and when his corpse was shuffled underground, with it would be buried the last shreds of Sergeant Beefs reputation.

However, in the meantime I needed rest. I gave no thought to all the queer and rather sordid people we had met in Sydenham, did not allow myself to wonder whether Mrs. Duncan had purchased her public-house, or whether the antique-dealer's wife had found other suspicious characters to follow, dismissed from my nostrils the stench of old Fryer's yard, and the musty odour of the Cypresses, gave no thought to the two ill-assorted pairs of lovers: Ed Wilson and his quiet pale wife, and Peter
Ferrers with the doctor's talkative widow; did not ask if Freda had found herself another situation in which to exercise her talents for invective and breaking dishes; forgot the sinister face of Wakefield, and the narrow eyes and tight lips of Wilkinson, reverted no more to the young mechanic as a suspect, or the shadowy personality of Oppenstein, dismissed from my mind all those things which had once seemed clues; swordstick and key, bloodstain and paper stolen from Peter's room; turned, in other words, from all the mass of misery and ugliness which had made up the Sydenham murder case, and settled myself into the Norfolk countryside.

I used to get up at dawn and look for mushrooms, finding in that simpler search more satisfaction than I had known in the pursuit of evidence.

When the morning papers eventually gave news of the appeal, it seemed unreal to me, and by the time I came to read that the appeal had failed I was reconciled to the conviction that Stewart was guilty, and that he would be hanged. I was sorry for Beef, but like him I could do no more.

One morning, as I returned to the cottage in which I was staying, my landlady met me at the door and handed me a telegram.

“I hope there's no bad news,” she said, coming from a class to whom telegrams are still fateful and sinister things. I read it with irritation.

MUST WRITE HOME SECRETARY URGENTLY NEED YOUR HELP PLEASE RETURN TO LONDON BEEF.

I turned this over in my hand for five minutes, until I was told that lunch was ready, and while I ate some excellent cold roast chicken I debated sourly over it. Why should I give up the peace and pleasure of this quiet and level countryside to return to London with no better object than to help Beef compose a letter which would in any case do no good now? There was nothing more for me to get from this case, and I only wanted to finish my holiday and start work afresh in new surroundings. I decided that I would not be called back to London in so forlorn a matter, and wired back that afternoon:

USELESS TO WRITE HOME SECRETARY CANNOT LEAVE MUCH NEEDED HOLIDAY ADVISE YOU ABANDON DETECTION AND PURCHASE PUBLIC HOUSE TOWNSEND.

Just before tea-time the postman, with an aggrieved look as though he took it as unfair that he should have to journey twice in one day to my cottage, handed me another telegram which I read with a sigh.

PREFER CUSTOMER'S SIDE OF COUNTER ARRIVE
8:10 B
EEF.

Well, if he was nothing else, the Sergeant was tenacious. It seemed that he was not going to admit having blundered in this case until Stewart was actually hanged.

I felt perhaps slightly flattered at his mountain to Mohammed tactics, but at the same time realized
again how little experienced in life he must be. First to think that a letter from him to the Home Secretary could help Stewart, and second, to need me to write it for him. However, I went down to the station to meet him.

He looked fitter and more cheerful, I thought, than when I had seen him during the trial, and it was the old Beef who, as he gripped my hand, asked what the darts were like at the local.

“I thought you'd come to get a letter written,” I pointed out severely.

“Plenty of time for that tomorrow,” said Beef. “He's not being hanged for a week, and I couldn't give my mind to anything of that sort after being shut up in a train all these hours. You and I will see the two best in the house. I hope you play better than you did in London. If you'd only keep them on the board it would be something.”

That was all I could get out of him before we sat under the low beams of the Anglian Maid, and the rest of that evening was spent as Beef wished. I must own that he became very popular with the local customers whom he flattered by saying that they threw as pretty a dart as he had seen outside London.

But no sooner had we had breakfast next morning than he asked for pen and paper, and sat facing me across the little table.

“Now,” he said, “you write, and I'll tell you what to say.”

Out of charity, I suppose, out of sheer kind-heartedness for old Beef in these moments of his failure, I
wrote the letter he asked, realizing that with every word that went down on paper how useless it would be. His clumsy flattery was my only reward.

“You don't half know how to put words together,” he said before he thrust out a great length of tongue to lick the envelope. “He'll have to take some notice of that, won't he?”

And because I felt too dispirited by his optimism to argue, I said, “I suppose so,” and left Beef to post our joint effort.

B
UT
when the day for the execution of Stewart Ferrers approached I found that I could not remain placidly in the country. I grew nervous and irritable, and the kindly little Norfolk woman who was my landlady asked me more than once if I “wasn't well.” It began to seem to me that I myself had been responsible for this approaching hanging of an innocent man. If, I argued miserably as I lay awake at night, a more competent detective than Beef had been called in, surely he would have found the evidence that would have cleared Stewart. Beef had discovered just enough to be sure that he had not done it, and not enough to be able to prove it. And then, I thought, the calling in of Beef had been my fault. For if I had not taken him up while he was still a village policeman and turned his lucky solutions into complicated triumphs, he would never have had enough reputation for Peter Ferrers to have employed him.

So, I said to myself, I was in part to blame, and there seemed to be nothing in the world I could do about it. If Stewart Ferrers had been a woman, or an imbecile, or if circumstances could have been produced which would have made the murder of
Benson in any way forgivable, there might have been a chance of persuading the Home Secretary to listen to a public appeal signed by a great number of influential people. But the murder had been a brutal one, and the actions of Stewart, as presented by the police, merited as severe a punishment as that given to any murderer. There seemed to be no hope.

After fighting for some days against the inclination to return to London, I suddenly decided to pack my bags and go back. It was not that I felt I could do anything, but at least I wanted to be on the spot and not showing so much indifference to the hideous fate of the man who was to be hanged. I found Beef himself in a somewhat agitated state, though not as profoundly stirred as one would have expected.

“Where it comes in,” he said, “is when you've had years and years of dealing with all sorts of things. You get blunted. I remember a young fellow sent to prison for a month over a house-breaking job. And it turned out he'd only been frightened into doing what he had done by a whole gang of men what we arrested nicely afterwards. And there was another case of a lady suspected of robbing a mission box who…”

“Don't let's go into your past achievements as a policeman,” I said sharply. “This is much too serious.”

“I know it's serious,” Beef returned. “I'm only saying that I'm accustomed to having tragedy through my hands.”

“What has been done since I was here?” I asked.

“Well, I sent my letter off to the Home Secretary telling him all the reasons I had for thinking it wasn't Stewart. I only had a printed slip in reply saying that it had been received.”

“Did you expect anything more?” I asked.

“Well, it was a long letter, wasn't it?” Beef pointed out.

“So that the poor chap's going to be hanged on Thursday?”

“That's right. Horrible business too.”

“And you don't think it's your fault?”

“'Course it isn't,” said Beef. “You don't blame a doctor when he works to save a patient and can't, do you? I've done my best, as I've told you before.”

I got up hurriedly, feeling that I could not stand any more of Beefs complacent murmurings. Beef followed me into the hall, and just at that moment the telephone bell rang.

“Here, wait a minute,” said Beef, picking up the receiver, “it might be something.”

“I don't doubt it,” I said coldly; “at least a wrong number,” and I went on towards the door. But something in Beefs voice as he answered the 'phone stopped me with my hand on the knob.

“But what is it?” he kept insisting, and then after a few moments of puzzled listening, “Hallo? Hallo?” He put the instrument down and looked at me almost guiltily.

“It's something new come up,” he said. “That was that antique-dealer's wife. She said it was
important, but she wouldn't tell me what it was. Said we was to come down.”

This time I made no protest as the two of us got into the car. By now the journey had become something of a penance, and I knew that Beef understood my protest without my taking the trouble to make it. But what, I thought viciously to myself, could that interfering old woman have discovered now that would be worth driving across London for. That Fryer was not the old tramp's real name, or some such useless piece of inquisitiveness, I supposed. Now that Beef had started her off on the idea that anyone could be a detective, she looked like being something of a menace.

Beef was silent as we drove along, and I had time to attempt to clarify my thoughts about the whole case. While I had been away in Norfolk the danger in which Stewart stood of being hanged had tortured me. But now that I had returned to London the whole atmosphere seemed to have changed. Somehow it was inconceivable that this thing could come about. I had accepted the fact that a crime-writer's detective could actually fail to discover the guilty person in a case, or, as in the present one, be incapable of saving an innocent man's life. But was it really possible? It was a thing that had never been allowed to happen before, and with that huge and influential precedent behind it, could it happen now? Since the case had started in such a stereotyped way, was it possible that it would finish with a last-minute rescue?
This seemed the only possible ending. We had begun the whole thing under the worst possible conditions. Perhaps Beef was really to blame, not for being inefficient, but for being so naive as to set up near Baker Street. I began to feel that, even more important than saving Stewart from the gallows, I must rescue the case from the hackneyed ending of a last-minute rescue. Perhaps in this very drive down to Sydenham I was helping to bring to light just the one piece of evidence that Beef needed.

But I need not have worried myself about this, for the first words the antique-dealer's wife spoke when we drew up once more in front of the shop were exciting enough even if they were half expected.

“She's run away,” she said even before the car had stopped moving. “I don't know what it means, but it seems very queer to me. I said to myself, there's one man who ought to know about this straight away, and that's Sergeant Beef, I said. He may not have been able to find enough to get Mr. Ferrers off, I said, but perhaps this is just the evidence he's been waiting for.”