“Oh come, Humbleby.” Fen was mildly shocked. “It’s not common, I grant you, but there are plenty of cases on record, John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, is one. Gross and Taylor and Sydney Smith quote others. Brain injuries don’t kill at once, and in a certain proportion of cases they don’t kill at all. They don’t necessarily involve loss of consciousness or inability to act, either: there was that fourteen-year-old boy, you remember, who tripped and fell on an iron rod he was carrying; the rod went clean through his brain; but all that happened was that he pulled it out and went on home, and he didn’t die until more than a week later, after an interlude during which he hadn’t even felt particularly ill…
“But Garstin-Walsh must have had a nasty turn when the man he’d left for dead burst in at his french windows. No wonder he was ‘fairly thoroughly unnerved.’ No wonder his shot went wild. But no wonder, also, that Brebner could hardly hold the shotgun with which he intended to revenge himself; no wonder he collapsed just after Garstin-Walsh fired at him…
“Garstin-Walsh must have rejoiced. He’d murdered a man, and now, by the queerest combination of accidents, the thing had been made to seem a perfect case of self-defence. The only snag lay in that superfluous, that tell-tale bullet-hole in the study wall. In the excitement following Brebner’s collapse it wouldn’t be noticed—the more so if a piece of furniture were unobtrusively shifted so as to conceal it. But there was no chance during the night of removing the bullet and plugging the hole; and there was very little chance that Jourdain would miss it when he examined the study next morning. So Garstin-Walsh, having heard from his housekeeper of Jourdain’s presence,and intentions, and seeing no opportunity, with such a crowd of people in the house, of slipping into the study and dealing with the hole before meeting Jourdain, loaded his revolver with two live cartridges and a blank; and then—you having placed yourself conveniently in position near the french windows and the bullet-hole—staged his nervous breakdown.”
There was a long silence. Then Humbleby said: “Yes, I’m sure you’re right. But it’s all conjecture, of course.”
“Oh, quite,” said Fen cheerfully. “If my theory’s false, there won’t be any proof of it. And if it’s true, there won’t be any proof of it, either. So you can take your choice. The only possibility of checking it would be if the—”
He was interrupted by the shrilling of the telephone. “That might be for me,” Humbleby told him. “I took the liberty of asking Jourdain to get in touch with me here if there was any news, so…”
And in fact the call was for him. He listened long and spoke little. And presently, ringing off, he said:
“Yes, it was Jourdain, He’s found those cartridge-cases.”
“In a place where he’d looked previously?”
“No. And none of them is a blank. Which means—”
“Which means,” said Fen as he picked up the whisky decanter and refilled their glasses, “that on this side of eternity there’s at least one thing we shall
never
know.”
In a room in Belchester Mortuary—a plain room with a faint smell of formalin, where dust-motes hung suspended in a single shaft of sunlight-the financier and the labourer lay on deal tables under greyish cotton sheets, side by side. The scene was of a sort to evoke facile moralising, all the more so since the labourer had left his wife moderately well off, whereas the financier had died penniless. But neither Gervase Fen—for whom, thanks to the repetitious insistence of the English poets, such moralising had long since lost its first freshness—nor Superintendent Best—who like most plain men felt that the democracy of death was too large and obvious and absolute a fact to require comment—was moved to remark, or even to reflect on, the commonplace irony of it, In any case, they were not, as yet, fully informed: at this stage the financier was not yet known to be a financier, was not yet docketed and filed as the undischarged bankrupt who had changed his identity, fled from London, and at last, in God knows what access of fear or despair, cut his own throat with the ragged blade of a pocket-knife in a lonely part of the moors. To the authorities he was still no better than an anonymous suicide; so that when Fen, after a brief scrutiny of the shrunken, waxy face, was able to announce that this was in fact the stranger with whom he had recently talked in the hotel bar at Belmouth, and whose touched-up photograph, issued by the police, he had seen in that morning’s papers, Superintendent Best heaved a sigh of relief.
“That’s something, sir, anyway,” he said. “It gives us a starting-point, at least—and there’s things in that conversation you had with him that’ll narrow it down quite a lot. So if you wouldn’t mind coming back to the station straight away, and making a formal statement…”
Fen nodded assent. “No other reaction so far? To the photograph, I mean?”
“Not yet. There’s almost always a bit of a time-lag, you know.”
“Ah,” said Fen affirmatively; and his eyes strayed to the shrouded occupant of the further table. “Who’s that?” he demanded.
“Chap called Edgar Foley. Drowning case. They picked him out of the water yesterday, and his widow’s coming along this morning to have a look at him.” Best consulted his watch. “And talking of that, I think it’d be a good thing if we were to clear out before they—”
But he was too late; and he was destined to reflect, later, that it was just as well he had been too late-for if Fen had never set eyes on the widow of Edgar Foley, the topic of Foley’s death might well have lapsed, and in that case an unusually mean and contemptible crime would probably have gone unpunished. For the moment, however, Best was merely embarrassed, since the room possessed only one door, and with the arrival of the newcomers his retreat was cut off. He moved back against the wall, therefore, waiting; and with Fen at his side was witness to what followed.
A Sergeant, helmet under oxter, led the way; he stood aside, holding the door, until his two companions had entered. Inevitably. it was the smaller of the two, the man, who claimed attention first, for this was an imbecile in the technical sense, of the word, an ament-flat-topped skull, decaying teeth, abnormal ears, tiny eyes, coarse skin; well below average height, but with long ape-like arms, muscularly well-developed. The age—as so often with these tragic parodies of humanity—it was impossible to guess at; but you could see the terror mastering that feeble, inarticulate brain, and you could hear the whimpering as the deformed head moved from side to side… Suddenly, with a sort of howl, the idiot turned and bolted from the room at a shambling run. And the woman who was with him said hesitantly to the Sergeant: “Shall I…?”
“He’ll be all right, ma’am, will he?”
“‘Im’ll wait outside,” she said. ‘Won’t get run over nor nothing.”
Well, my orders were, he wasn’t to be forced to do it if he didn’t want. So long as he’s safe…”
“Yes, he’s safe,” she said. ‘He won’t go away from where I am.”
And without so much as a glance at Fen or Best she moved forward to where the body of her husband lay. She was perhaps thirty-five, Fen saw: an uneducated country-woman with an impassive, slow-moving dignity of her own. Straight black hair was drawn back to a coil at the nape of her neck; her skin was very thick and smooth, ivory-complexioned; she wore no make-up of any kind. Her black coat and skirt were cheap and shabby, and her legs were bare; and because she was not dressed to attract, you overlooked, at first, the matronly shapeliness of her. She was calm, now, to the point almost of dullness; when the Sergeant drew back the sheet from the face of the man she had married her expression never altered.
“That’s ‘im,” she said emotionlessly. “That’s Foley.”
It was dispassionate and quite final. Replacing the sheet, the Sergeant ushered her out. And Fen, who had been unconsciously holding his breath, expelled it in a sigh.
“Rather a remarkable woman,” he commented. “How did her husband come to be drowned? Accident?”
Best shook his head. “It was the idiot. The idiot pushed him in—according to
her,
that is: there wasn’t any other witness, and the idiot can’t talk at all, can’t even understand what you’re asking him, most of the time…” Best crossed to the body of Foley, and uncovered the dead face; Fen joined him. “Not pretty, is he? Wasn’t any too pretty when he was alive, either.”
“M’m,” said Fen. “It looks as if he must have been in the water a week or more.”
For a moment Best was surprised; then abruptly he smiled.
“I was forgetting,” he said, “that you knew about these things… Six days, actually.”
“And badly knocked about, too.” Fen had pulled the sheet further down and was contemplating the body with some interest. “Rocks, I suppose: currents.”
“Rocks,” said Best. “And currents and rapids and weirs and deep pools.”
“Rapids? Weirs?” Fen looked up. “The river, you mean? I was imagining he’d been drowned in the sea.”
“No, no, sir. What happened—d’you know Yeopool?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, you probably wouldn’t: it’s only a tiny village, just down off the edge of the moors. Anyway, Yeopool’s where Foley and his wife lived, and that’s where he got pushed in. It’s a treacherous bit of the river there, even for anyone who can swim—and he couldn’t: so I don’t imagine he lasted long. …
Afterwards,
he must have got tangled up under water somehow or other. It was fifteen miles downstream, at a village called Clapton, that they picked him up yesterday, and by that time he’d been so battered that he didn’t have a shred of clothing left on him anywhere… That’s not uncommon, sir, as you’ll know.”
“In a fast-moving river,” Fen agreed, “you could almost say it was the rule. Except of course for the—”
But at this point a Mortuary attendant looked in; and: “O.K., Frank,” called Best. “All finished. Has that other lot gone?” Frank indicated that it had. “Then we’ll go, too.” Best pulled the sheet back into position. “Don’t you waste your pity on Foley, though,” he said to Fen as they left the room. “If you
should
feel like being sorry for him, just keep in mind what he was doing at the time the idiot shoved him in.”
“Which was?”
“He’d hit his wife and knocked her on to the ground,” said Best calmly, “and he was kicking her with his heavy boots. Not for the first time, either… Yes.
He’s
where he belongs. And if his widow isn’t exactly inconsolable, you can hardly blame her, can you?”
In the police-car, on the way back to the police-station, Fen remained mute; it was only when they were actually pulling into the yard that he spoke again.
“This Foley business,” he said: “are you handling it yourself?”
“No. The Chief’s handling it.”
“The Chief
Constable,
you mean?”
‘That’s it: Commander Bowen.”
“But does he often do that sort of thing?”
Best parked the car tidily, switched off the engine, and leaned back. “No, thank God,” he said with candour. “Point is, though, he himself
lives
at Yeopool. So when Mrs. Foley reported the accident—or the murder, call it what you like—to the village constable, the village constable went straight to the C.C.; and he, seeing it had to do with some of his own people—he rather fancies himself playing the Squire with ‘em—he decided he’d deal with it personally. A good thing, too,” Best added, “that it isn’t anything more complicated than what it is. A year and a half in the Thames police, thirty years ago, isn’t much training for serious C.I.D. work these days.”
“That the only qualification he has, then?”
“The only
practical
qualification, yes. And he’s probably forgotten most of that during the time he was in the Navy. He’s all
right,
of course: too strict and rigid and pound-of-flesh and letter-of-the-law for my liking, but I suppose that’s a fault on the right side; and I’ll grant you he’s read up all the text-books since he got his job with us—for what that’s worth… But they don’t appoint his sort these days.” Best reached for the door-handle. “They appoint proper full-time cops, and a darned good thing too.”
With this view Fen was on the whole in agreement. But for the time being he only nodded abstractedly, and his abstraction appeared to be deepened, rather than otherwise, by the subsequent business of dictating a statement about his recent chance encounter with the suicidal financier; so that Best was not altogether surprised when presently, while they waited for the statement to be typed, he returned to the attack.
“Motive,” he said without preamble. “Obviously Foley’s brutality to his wife was enough in itself to make her wish him dead, but was there anything
more?”
“There was life-insurance.” Best shifted rather uneasily in his chair. “Not a fortune—not by any means—but a surprising lot for just a farm labourer… Look here, sir, I quite see what you’re getting at: it’s obvious the wife
could
have done it, and put the blame on the idiot, and no one a bit the wiser. But there’s no proof—can’t be—and what with one thing and another—”
“You think it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.” Fen lit a cigarette. “Only sooner or later, you know, they wake up of their own accord and then there’s liable to be trouble anyway…” Did they come on here from the Mortuary—the wife, I mean, and the idiot?”
“Yes. They’re waiting here now for the C.C. to arrive.” Best craned his neck to look out of the office window. “Which he hasn’t done yet, because his car’s not in the yard. He had an informal talk with them last night, after he’d been to Clapton to look at the body, and today he’s going to have it all taken down in shorthand… Hello, here he comes. We’ll have to clear out of here now, I’m afraid-though why the devil he has to choose
my
office to hold his interviews in…”
“I want to stay,” Fen interrupted. “I want to be present at this thing.”
Best shrugged. “Well, you can ask, can’t you?” he said. “He’ll have heard of you all right. But
I
shan’t sponsor you, if you don’t mind. Life’s too short, and so’s his temper, every now and again.”
“I won’t involve you in it,” Fen promised. “What I’d better do, I think, is try to catch him as he comes in… Oh, just one other thing.”