Case with No Conclusion (26 page)

“Oh, Beef, Beef,” I said sadly, “will you never learn anything about human nature? All he wanted was a story for his paper, and, good gracious, haven't you given him one!”

“Yes, and I'll give him another,” said Beef, rising to his feet, “and one he can't print, or not in his paper, anyway. There's many a time when I was in the Force I'd like to have had a go at one of these
chaps, and couldn't because of my uniform. But there's nothing to stop me now. Talk about tears in Mrs. Beefs eyes! His mother won't know who he is when he comes home tonight.”

“Don't be ridiculous, Beef. You'd never be able to see him even if you did go down to the offices of the
Daily Dose.
”

Beef hesitated. “No,” he said, “I suppose they'd know what I was after. But I'll catch him one day, you see if I don't. Hiding my face in my hands! He'll have to hide his face in his hands when I've done with it.”

“You're not the only sufferer from that sort of thing,” I pointed out. “People are reported as behaving in that manner every morning.”

“So they may be, but perhaps they can't all take care of themselves.”

“You might realize,” I said, “how I look. You don't think it's very pleasant for me, do you? It's not only yourself you've ruined by failing in this case, and giving that interview, but me too. Here I've been working to build up a reputation for you, and the whole thing's smashed. If you did ever get another case there's not a publisher in London would use the story of it.”

How right I was in those words was shown next morning when the
Daily Dose
returned to the attack.

Investigators Disturbed by Unheard-of Collapse

Writers of detective novels met in gloomy silence in their clubs yesterday following Angus Braithwaite's exposure of
a failure by one of their creations. They are asking themselves where this will lead.

Since Sergeant Beef, Townsend's “master mind” of detection, admitted that he had believed Stewart Ferrers innocent and could not prove it, they feel that the future is insecure.

“
Suppose this sort of thing becomes common,” said one of them to a
Daily Dose
reporter yesterday. “What will happen to crime no vels ? The public will lose confidence in our investigators and our circulation will fall by many thousands.
”

“It is most unfortunate,” said a well-known publisher of crime novels, “and a very dangerous precedent. If novelists' investigators cannot solve the problems created, who in the world can?”

Lord Simon Plimsol, distinguished amateur detective and hero of many ingenious cases, gave another view when we saw him in his West End flat yesterday. “Borin' business to find on return from one's honeymoon,” he sighed, “though I've always anticipated that someone would get themselves into a mess some day.”

In answer to a long-distance telephone call to the Near East, Monsieur Amer Picon, who has so brilliantly solved many more intricate cases than this, cabled enigmatically “
Hé'las! 'Mon
Dieu. Je ne sais quoi,” were his words to the
Daily Dose.

Monsignor Smith waved his sunshade despairingly. “If the investigator fails to arrest the criminal,” he said, “it can only be a matter of time before the criminal succeeds in arresting the investigator. If the novelist cannot find the end of the case, the case must be the end of the novelist.”

I sank back into my armchair when I read this half-column of staring type. I realized that, for Beef and me, our brief attempt to invade this realm was finally frustrated.

A
NUMBER
of weeks passed in which I heard no more of the Sydenham murder case, and I thought about it as little as possible. No one likes to be humiliated, and my own feelings were bitter.

Besides, I was looking to the future, and realized that I had to find another subject for my Boswellian efforts. I went down to Worcester to interview the parson of whom I had heard, but found another novelist already entrenched in the vicarage and busily following the Reverend Duncan Hardacre through the intricacies of a local poisoning. Neither of them welcomed me in the least, and the novelist was inclined to be rude when I explained what had brought me down.

I was becoming extremely anxious about the future, in fact, when to my surprise I received a telephone call from Beef.

“The time has come,” he said, “at which I can give you further details.”

I resigned myself to one last visit to Lilac Crescent, and drove round there the next day.

“Sit down,” said Beef unexpectedly, “and I'll tell you all.”

“All?” I repeated.

“All,” he said.

“Do you mean to say that at this point you've suddenly discovered the truth about that business?”

“Never mind at what point I discovered it. You're going to hear it now. Sit still and I'll tell you the real facts about the Sydenham murders.”

“Murders?” I gasped, genuinely surprised. “Do you mean to say there were two murders?”

“Three,” said Beef calmly, and lit his pipe.

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely serious,” said Beef.

At this point I saw the futility of further interruptions. Beef would have to tell the story in his own way and I would have to sit and listen to it.

“All right, go ahead,” I conceded, and he began.

“The trouble with you, T.,” he said with irritating condescension, “is that you don't notice things. If you'd noticed things all through this case you wouldn't need to come to me now to hear what I know. For instance, the very first thing that happened was Peter coming here, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” I said, “I noticed that.”

“Ah, but what did I say to him?” asked Beef.

“So far as I remember, there was some harking back to one of your ridiculous darts championships.”

“Ex-actly,” said Beef, “ex-actly. Now, if instead of calling that ridiculous you'd have taken some notice of it, it would have led you to the truth. You see that was an important darts championship, for a silver cup presented by old Mr. Ferrers.”

“Well?” I said.

“Doesn't that show,” asked Beef, “that he was a gentleman? A gentleman,” he repeated impressively, “in every sense of the word. I met him at the time. One of the best you ever met. No narrow-mindedness about him, I can tell you. He offered that cup, and he presented it himself, and George Watson and me won it.”

“George Watson and I,” I corrected quietly.

“You!” roared Beef—“you can't get a dart on the board.”

“I was correcting your grammar,” I explained icily, and Beef went on.

“At any rate, as you'll see later,” he said, “my knowing and respecting that old gentleman has made all the difference. But now I'll tell you the story. Only, mind you,”—he stretched a blunt forefinger towards me—“it
is
only a story, and I couldn't prove it in a court of Law. At least, not without finding more evidence, and I'm not going to start that now. But you shall have it as I see it, right from the start.

“When it was clear that Benson was blackmailing Stewart, did it never occur to you to wonder what he was blackmailing him with? You can't get several sums of five hundred pounds out of a man without you know something pretty serious about him. Well, I can tell you what it was. He was blackmailing him with the murder of his own father.”

“But old Ferrers died two years ago. There was nothing irregular about his death. Not even an inquest. There was a death certificate…”

“Yes, and who signed it?” asked Beef triumphantly. “The two of them were in it together. Stewart was in debt. More than that, he was in the hands of moneylenders. He was in a desperate position. He knew his father's money would come to him when the old gentleman died, but he needed it at once, so he decided to murder him. And he went about it in a way more criminals would have used if there were more doctors like Benson about. He made a pact with Benson. ‘If I poison the old man,' he said, ‘will you sign the death certificate and make everything regular? And I'll pay you so much.' Benson agreed and supplied him with the poison.”

“Where's your proof of all this?” I asked.

Beef held up his hand. “Steady, steady,” he said. “All in good time. As I was saying, Benson supplied the poison with instructions to Stewart as to how to give it him. Stewart gave it him, the poor old gentleman croaked, and there was Benson, the trusted family doctor, to make everything smooth and right. But the two of them overlooked one thing—that was young Peter. He was fond of his father, and wouldn't never have got mixed up in anything of that sort. If you remember, the butler told us (though I daresay you didn't take any notice of it at the time) that he was with his father right up to the end, and afterwards. It's my belief he was there when Benson came to examine old Mr. Ferrers, and saw the doctor remove the rest of the medicine into which Stewart had put the poison.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, Benson wasn't going to leave it there, was he, if he knew what was in it? 'Course he wasn't. He took it away and took it back to his surgery. But he didn't destroy it. Perhaps he had some idea of blackmailing Stewart with it, or he may just have forgotten to destroy it, but anyway, there it was in his dispensary.”

“How long?” I asked.

“Till Peter broke into the house and took it. That's another thing you didn't take any notice of, isn't it?—Sheila Benson saying there was a burglary there. It interested me, a burglary did. I know a bit about burglaries. I haven't been a sergeant for nothing. ‘Why,' I said to myself, ‘should anyone want to burgle a house like Benson's? Specially when he never went farther than the surgery according to Sheila Benson's account, and never took anything of any value. No, that aroused my suspicions.”

“All this,” I pointed out, “is the merest supposition.”

“Do give me a chance to make my case,” pleaded Beef with pretended exasperation. “When Peter got that medicine by breaking into Benson's dispensary he decided to make sure that what he thought was right. So he sent it off to an analyst, and the analyst gave him a report showing the medicine was chock-f of poison.”

“How do you know that?” I asked again.

“I'll tell you,” said Beef. “Did you hear me ask Peter for the address of an analyst? Did you never
think to yourself that I could have found out on my own who was the best analyst to send anything to? Do you think I should ask anyone mixed up in the case for an analyst's address without having some reason for it? Well, I did have some reason. I was just hoping he would give me an analyst that he knew himself; that he'd used before. The one, in fact, to whom he'd sent the poison that murdered his father.

“And he did. The man not only analysed the whisky I took him, but he told me all I wanted to know about his last job for Peter. This bottle of medicine was sent in, quite ordinary medicine, containing so much of such and such a poison, and the analyst had made that report to Peter.

“But Peter had something else, something which proved to him that the two of them had worked together. How he'd got it I don't know, and I don't suppose we ever shall know. But he had, securely tucked away, the very piece of paper on which Benson had written his instructions when he gave the stuff to Stewart. ‘Add this to the medicine,' he'd written, and sent whatever poison it was. So Peter knew what he was up to. He knew Benson was in it by supplying the poison and giving a death-from-natural-causes sort of certificate. He knew his brother was in it because he'd received those instructions from Benson, and hadn't never said afterwards anything about it, which he would have done had Benson been swinging it. I imagine that Peter actually noticed Benson packing up the
bottle of medicine and taking it away with him, and perhaps that was what aroused his suspicions. Then he went through his brother's papers and found that little note in Benson's writing, and then he knew just where he was.

“But in the meantime the old gentleman's body had been cremated, and what was the good of a bit of paper and a bottle of medicine to bring home the crime to those two that were guilty? He saw for himself he wouldn't have a chance of getting them convicted, so he kept quiet and waited his time.”

“Good Lord,” I said, for I began to see it all.

“He wasn't half clever,” reflected Beef, “and he didn't mean to take any chances. He was fond of his father and he meant to avenge the old man against those as had done the dirty on him. And he worked out a way in which he could do it neat and final. And he did too. That's how there were three murders. The murder of old Ferrers by Benson and Stewart, the murder of Benson, and the murder of Stewart by faking the evidence and getting him hanged. Three of them, and you thought there was only one.” Beef almost chuckled.

“You never noticed another thing,” Beef went on. “Old Ferrers was cremated. That was done in case there was any question as to how he died. But to make it reasonable, Benson's been recommending cremation ever since, and he's had dozens cremated. See how it all works out?”

“P
ETER'S
idea,” said Beef, “was to murder one of them himself in such a way as would get the other one hanged for doing it. What do you say to that? Clever, wasn't it? The first thing he had to do was to find a motive. He didn't know anything about the blackmailing or he wouldn't have needed to have looked any further. He had, in fact, to make a motive.

“We know how he did that. Wherever we turned in Sydenham we heard that story about Sheila Benson and Stewart. And wherever we tried to trace it to its origin, we failed. Why? Because it had no origin. I been studying American methods lately.” Beef paused grandly. “Have you ever heard of a whispering campaign? They use it over there for almost anything—to ruin a politician, or to make a book popular. Well, Peter Ferrers started one all on his own to create a motive for a murder what hadn't yet been committed. He made everyone in Sydenham start talking about his brother and Sheila Benson, and as you know, people are always too ready to talk. You saw that parson jump up like a trout when we mentioned Stewart and Sheila Benson. I bet there wasn't one of his congregation who hadn't enjoyed it. And it would have been the same all round.