Cold, Lone and Still

16: The Rounding-Up

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So, all these extraneous details being settled, we were back to the murder. Hera was a late riser when she was not working, so at nine the next morning I went to her flat and pushed through her letter-box the package containing the ring. This meant that I arrived at the office earlier than usual, for Sandy and I did not show up usually until ten.

I found Elsa busy dealing with the morning’s correspondence.

‘My, my!’ she said. ‘Couldn’t we sleep? Was our conscience troubling us? That policeman has been here asking to see you. I told him to try again later.’

‘What does he want, I wonder? There is nothing I can tell him about myself that he doesn’t know already.’

A telephone call came through half an hour later. Polly answered it and put Bingley through to me. I said I would be charmed to see him whenever he wanted an interview and he replied to this that he would come round at once. Sandy had arrived before Bingley turned up, so, when I had congratulated him on his engagement to Elsa, I told him what was in the wind and prophesied (rightly, as it happened) that somebody under pressure had magnified the story of my punch-up with Carbridge at Crianiarich.

I took Bingley into my office, told Elsa to see that we were not disturbed and waited for Bingley’s opening gambit. It was what I had expected.

‘You had a serious disagreement with the deceased while you were on your Scottish tour, Mr Melrose.’

‘Disagreement, yes. Serious, no.’

‘It concerned your fiancée, Miss Camden.’

‘May I point out that you are behind the times, Detective Chief Inspector? Not my fiancée any longer, and not Miss Camden. Try Mrs Todd.’

‘Are you serious, sir?’

‘Oh, yes. The walking tour was an experiment before Mrs Todd applied for a divorce so that she could marry me. The result has told us both where we stand — apart.’

‘What you tell me lends a different aspect to the matters arising. The reports I have received may have been somewhat exaggerated, sir.’

‘A bit of luck for me, if you think so.’

‘Yes, you may say that, sir. I shall need to check this new piece of information before taking further steps. Mrs Todd, you say?’

‘Alas, yes. Love’s young dream is over, so far as I am concerned.’

He looked at me and at the flower in my buttonhole. It was a pink rosebud given me by Polly because, she said, it looked festive and so did I. Bingley must have agreed with her, for he said that I appeared to be taking my bereavement extremely well. He left soon after he had said that, and I had the impression that he was a baffled man. I wondered whether he had come to the office with a warrant for my arrest. Of one thing I was certain. If he had received an exaggerated account of the punch-up, it would have come from one of three people. It could have been from Hera herself, from Todd (with whom I had exchanged words, although not blows) or Perth. There was a possible fourth, namely James Minch, always ready with a rush of words to the mouth. Neither he nor Perth would have intended any harm, but they might have done my cause a great deal of mischief, all the same.

Whichever one of them it was, there could be no doubt that I had given Bingley something to think about and, as any respite is to be preferred to sudden death, I was grateful for it. I expected Bingley to return later in the day, but he did not do so and the next step in the solution to his problem came in the form of a telephone call to me from Dame Beatrice. She had been called upon officially in her capacity as psychiatric adviser to the Home Office, she said, and at Bingley’s request.

‘I have to question certain members of the Scottish expedition,’ she said. ‘I shall take Laura with me to record the interviews, but I need your support in reassuring my suspects.’

‘Perth would be far more useful.’

‘Laura said that you would jib.’

‘No, no, I’m not jibbing. Of course I’ll do anything you say.’

‘The police,’ said Dame Beatrice in a reminiscent tone, ‘are seldom wrong when they have very definite suspicions that they know the identity of a criminal, but sometimes there are factors which they do not take into account.’

‘You mean Bingley thinks he knows who murdered Carbridge?’

‘Yes, and I can follow his reasoning, although I do not think he is right.’

‘But you have to find proof?’ I said.

She cackled. ‘Yes, indeed. I have to find proof, and when I find it he may be somewhat surprised.’

‘So you think he has set his sights on the wrong person?’

‘There are factors he has not taken into account.’

‘For instance?’ I looked for enlightenment, but it did not come. All that she added was: ‘Cast your mind back to the one evening you and Miss Camden spent at Fort William. Can you remember whether the home addresses of the various parties were exchanged? I know that Mr Trickett had a list, or he could not have sent out the invitations, but I think there must have been others.’

‘Oh, yes, there was a good deal of writing down and promising to keep in touch and all that kind of thing, but, anyway, I suppose people could have found out during the tour where other people lived if they were interested enough. Trickett, as you say, must have had a complete list. I believe he was the only person who asked for Hera’s address and mine. We were rather the odd men out because we had been with the rest of them so little.’

‘Then I think a telephone call to Mr Trickett will be sufficient for my purpose. Perhaps you would be good enough to make it for me. Ask whether Miss Coral Platt or Mr Freddie Brown is a home student. They were the two in charge of the catering at the students’ party, I am told.’

‘Ah!’ I said. ‘The kitchen knife that was found in the body and which was not the knife the pathologist thinks was the murder weapon.’

So, my having ascertained from Trickett that Coral was a home student but that Freddie was a boarder at the hall of residence during term-time, Dame Beatrice herself did the telephoning and fixed up an appointment with Coral for the following evening. Coral’s father insisted on being present at the interview and to this Dame Beatrice made no objection. She came straight to the point.

‘Where did you get the vegetable knife?’ she asked.

Coral looked distressed. I think she might have refused to answer the question, but her father said, ‘Speak up. Let’s have done with all this moping and worry. Your mother and I knew something was wrong. We thought you were pining over a love affair, but it sounds more serious than that. I’m sure Dame Beatrice knows you had nothing to do with that shocking affair.’ He put his hand over the girl’s and she turned her palm and clasped his fingers. Then she spoke out resolutely.

‘I borrowed the vegetable knife from our kitchen,’ she said. ‘I knew we were going to have hamburgers at the party, so I thought it would come in useful for chopping up the onions. I like a knife I’m used to and I didn’t know what sort of cutlery I should find at the men’s hall.’

‘I am afraid you will have to identify the knife which the police have in their possession,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but do not be afraid. We know the murder was not committed with it. It was used merely as a substitute. The inference is that, if the lethal weapon had been found, it would have given a clue to the identity of the killer.’

‘I wonder why he left Coral’s knife in the body and did not get rid of that, as well as his own weapon?’ I said.

‘He reasoned, no doubt, that Miss Platt’s knife would not be traced to him. Now, Miss Platt, you borrowed the vegetable knife from your mother’s kitchen. When did you realise that it had disappeared from the hall of residence?’

‘When Freddie and I got back from tea. We went to a Wimpy’s and when we got back the knife was gone, but I didn’t worry too much at the time because I had chopped up the onions — more, actually, than I thought we should need — before we went out to tea. It was after — well, you know — after we knew that a kitchen knife had been found in the body -’

‘Yes,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘do not distress yourself. When you knew that, you connected it with the disappearance of your own knife. Did the caretaker Bull come into the kitchen while you and Mr Freddie Brown were making your preparations?’

‘No, I’m sure he didn’t. He was helping in various ways, but I don’t remember him in the kitchen.’

‘When the police ask you to identify the knife, have no fear. As it was not the murder weapon, it has only secondary interest for them.’

Then we visited Freddie Brown. He was at the hall of residence and was cutting sections of rock plants and looking at them under a microscope. Sunny-tempered as ever, he showed no sign of resentment at being interrupted.

‘Now, Mr Brown,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘you may remember that, when preparations were being made for the students’ party, a small knife with which Miss Platt had been chopping onions was missing.’

‘Yes. We didn’t worry much, at least, not at the time. We thought one of the others had come into the kitchen and whipped it for some reason. There were quite a lot of people milling about, helping to get things ready. It was only when I read about the knife found in the body and told Coral that she began to panic. She begged me to say nothing to anybody about her loss of the knife, so, of course, I promised. Anyway, we don’t know that the knife was her knife, do we?’

‘We shall know when she identifies it,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Oh, I say! You’re not going to make the poor girl do that, are you? They don’t think it was that little knife which did the damage, but I suppose nobody but the murderer would have left it in the body.’

‘Quite so. Now, Mr Brown, to another matter: will you tell me whether you remember purchasing a souvenir in Fort William?’

‘Not me; hadn’t got the cash and didn’t see anything I wanted except a Caithness decanter which I couldn’t possibly afford. Some people bought things, but not me.’

‘Some people bought daggers, for example.’

‘Yes, two of the women who were hoping that Todd would — well—’

‘Extend his favours to them?’

‘I suppose you could put it like that, but, as Coral said to me, anybody could see with half an eye that they didn’t stand an earthly. He had his sights on —’ He looked at me and left the sentence unfinished.

‘Yes, I understand that Mr Todd refused to accept the gifts and that subsequently they passed into other hands,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Well, if you want to know, one of them passed into my hands,’ said Freddie. ‘I don’t know what happened to the other, but I got one in a raffle.’

‘Ah, yes, the weapon which was more than a hundred years old and therefore passed as an antique.’

‘Oh, no, absolutely not that beastly thing! I expect Todd kept that. It was valuable. The one that got raffled was the sgian dubh. I had just enough money to take a ticket and it seemed a suitable souvenir, being of the Highlands and all that. Minch laughed when the girl showed it off to the others before she tried to give it to Todd. Minch said it was only a toy and that he had a real one which he would show her sometime. I’ve got mine in my room. Would you like to see it?’

‘Very much,’ said Dame Beatrice. He was not gone long. He came back with the little dagger. It had a silver-mounted black sheath with a whacking great cairngorm stuck in the handle. Dame Beatrice looked it over and handed it to Laura. Their eyes met and I saw Laura shake her head. She remarked that some girls had more money than sense.

‘Well, thank you, Mr Brown,’ said Dame Beatrice. Laura handed back the sgian dubh and, as we were leaving, Freddie said nervously that he hoped he had not welshed on anybody. It had been a good tour and he had been glad he went on it until all this rotten business had followed on.

When I got back to my flat that night a most uneasy idea came into my mind. I mean, by that, an idea which made me uneasy. When Dame Beatrice and Laura came next day to my office and told me that they had an afternoon appointment with the Minches and hoped I would accompany them, I came out promptly and explosively with what was on my mind.

‘Look here,’ I said, addressing Laura instead of challenging Dame Beatrice’s brilliant black eyes, ‘you are not doing a Roger Ackroyd on me, are you?’

‘The elliptical form of your question nevertheless makes your meaning clear,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘No, my dear Comrie, we have no Hercule Poirot up our sleeves. Your presence is merely to assure our patients (if I may call them so) of the respectability and open-mindedness of our intentions. Do you forget that you also have been a patient of mine?’

‘Meaning that she knows you from soup to nuts, to borrow a phrase from my favourite author,’ said Laura. ‘So be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed (to borrow from yet another source of inspiration), so buck up. All is not lost.’

‘What was wrong with Freddie’s sgian dubh?’ I asked.

Dame Beatrice nodded to Laura, who replied, ‘Nothing was wrong with it, but those silver mountings were hardly hallmarked and the blade, when I examined it, was hardly a thing of tempered steel. In other words, I would take my oath that, wherever Freddie Brown’s sgian dubh came from, it is merely the tourist catchpenny implement James Minch despised and thereupon, if I am not mistaken, hangs a very interesting tale,’ said Laura.

‘And that is why we are going to visit the Minch family,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I am now working in close collaboration with Detective Chief Inspector Bingley and he tells me that James Minch denied having a sgian dubh in his stocking at the students’ party, though he admitted he had one at home.’

The Minches lived with their parents in a very pleasant house amid Oxshott woodlands. A maid answered the door. Dame Beatrice sent in her card and Jane Minch came along. Her father and James, she said, were playing golf and her mother had gone to a matinée. She asked us in and seated us.

‘I thought we were to meet your brother,’ said Dame Beatrice mildly.

‘My father says James talks too much, and he does, of course,’ said Jane. ‘My father says that anything James could tell you I can tell you equally well, and that is true, too.’

‘I am sure it is. What happened to the sgian dubh which your brother was questioned about after the murder?’

‘James wanted to get rid of it when that policeman seemed so interested in it, so he tried to sell it.’

‘I gather that he was unsuccessful,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Yes, he was, so we’ve still got the thing. It’s in his room. Do you want to see it?’ She went upstairs and came down with it. It was a lovely little thing, silver-mounted in a black sheath, elegant and slim, a replica, in fact, of the one Freddie Brown had shown us, but the genuine article, not a fake.

‘If he wants to sell that,’ said Laura, ‘and the price is fair, I’m in the market.’

‘Why did he become alarmed when the police interested themselves in this very charming little knife?’ asked Dame Beatrice. Jane came over to me and seated herself on the arm of my chair. I put my own arm round her.

‘Speak away,’ I said. ‘You are in front of the most impartial jury in the world.’

‘Including you?’

‘I’m not really in on this act.’

‘As a fellow Scot,’ said Laura, laying aside the sgian dubh with as much reluctance as Julius Caesar, according to Casca, laid aside the circlet which would have made him emperor of Rome, ‘I can assure you we have nothing up our sleeve. All we are doing is to clear the ground. It’s like one of those silly mathematics games, when, after the endless mental toil, you come back to the number you first thought of, so not to worry. We’re only cutting away the dead wood.’

‘James talks too much, but about what?’ I asked, tightening the arm I had put round her. ‘Look, Jane, nobody thinks James killed Carbridge, so what has he got to be so careful about?’

‘He had a quarrel with Carbridge while we were on the tour.’

‘Well, so had I,’ I said. ‘Fortunately for me, I can prove an alibi at the time of the murder. Can’t James?’

‘No, and I can’t help him, but it’s not as though you and he were the only ones. As a matter of fact, before we got to Fort William I think everybody was tired of Carbridge. He and Todd did the last part of the tour on their own, as I suppose you know. He had got under everybody’s skin by that time. He used to call those office girls Red Sails in the Sunset. They laughed about it at first, but it got very tiresome when he laboured it. Then he called me Young Plover’s Egg and when my feet began to play me up he tried to be funny about it —’

‘Did he!’ I said. ‘I wish I’d heard him!’

‘Then, the first time he called out “Toro! Toro!” when Todd came into the youth hostel common-room, Todd turned so white that I was afraid he was going to faint. Of course Carbridge saw he had upset him, so he harped on it. Then he used to call Perth the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. It was difficult to deal with him because, on the surface, it was all so good-humoured and he never exactly insulted anybody.’

‘Old boy, old boy!’ I said savagely. ‘What about Patsy Carlow and Coral Platt?’

‘Oh, they took everything in good part and so did Freddie Brown. The other person who objected strongly to Carbridge was Lucius Trickett, but he contented himself by referring to half-baked oafs and he had as little to do with Carbridge as possible.’

‘Most interesting,’ said Dame Beatrice. Something in her tone told me that she had learned a fact which she badly needed to know. Vaguely I connected it with Sally Lestrange and poor old Bull’s autobiography, although what brought that into my mind I could not say. Perhaps I really do have extra-sensory perception. Who knows? Anyway, Dame Beatrice rose from her chair with the satisfied smile of a snake which has tucked its goat safely into its gullet and is now prepared to sleep away the long process of digestion.

‘Mr Carbridge certainly seems to have possessed the gentle art of making enemies,’ she said.

Jane agreed and added, ‘But without the slightest idea that that was what he was doing. He was the most myopic fool I ever met.’

‘And, according to Perth, the onlooker who saw most of the game, he died because he was a fool,’ I said.

Meanwhile, the police, pursuing their usual unspectacular, mundane, pedestrian tactics, had found what they were convinced was the murder weapon. Bingley, it seemed, had argued that the murderer would have had very little time to get rid of it, so that the chances were he had hidden it somewhere near at hand. The puzzle was to decide his reason for having substituted another knife for it.

‘A case of muddled thinking,’ Trickett said to me when we were discussing the case much later. ‘He must have hoped to throw suspicion on Freddie and Coral and had no idea that the pathologist would spot it was the wrong knife.’

They looked in the obvious places at the hall of residence, such as under a loose floorboard they found in Trickett’s study-bedroom when he pointed it out to them, and at the bottom of the lavatory cisterns and the big tank in the roof, and then one of the coppers noticed that the flowerbeds in the little garden which formed the centre of the London square in which the hall of residence was set had been freshly dug over, so they did a bit of digging on their own account and found what the pathologist agreed could be the knife which had administered to the choked and dying Carbridge his coup de grâce.

It was not difficult to establish ownership. Called upon separately, Trickett, Freddie, Coral, Patsy, Perth, Tansy and Rhoda identified the dagger as the antique which had been given to Todd. Todd made no attempt at a denial, but said merely (and calmly) that he recognised the knife, that he had lost it soon after his return home and that he could offer no explanation of how it had got into the flowerbed. The police pointed out that it had also got into Carbridge’s body.

‘How did you get on with him?’ they asked. ‘Did you like him?’

‘Like the fellow?’ he said. ‘With everybody else I got heartily sick of him by the time that Scottish walk was over, but there was no harm in him. In fact, I had more to do with him than with anybody else on the tour and we finished at Fort William as a twosome, everybody else having chickened out and gone by bus. Any reason to murder the chap? Good Lord, if we were all murdered for our nuisance-value, who would be alive today? Not my Inspector of Taxes, to name but one!’