Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 49, No. 6. Whole No. 283, June 1967

Dead Man’s Shoes by Michael Innes

Young Derry Fisher, an up-and-coming estate agent, had a curious adventure on the 8:05 train back to London — curious indeed! As an opening situation you will find it (as the very pretty and very frightened young girl found it) a “disturbing episode” — and irresistible reading...

Here is one of Michael Innes’ best stories about Commissioner Sir John Appleby — a short novel of detection in the most literate tradition of English crime writing. It poses a very pretty (and very frightening) problem — a queer fish of a case, odd and puzzling and ingenious in the purest ’tec technique...

First-class entertainment!

Catching the 8:05 train had meant an early start for Derry Fisher. A young man adept at combining pleasure with business, he had fallen in with some jolly people in the seaside town to which his occasions had briefly taken him, and on his last night he had danced into the small hours.

As a result of this he was almost asleep now — and consequently at a slight disadvantage when the panting and wide-eyed girl tumbled into his compartment. This was a pity. It was something that had never happened to him before.

“Please... I’m so sorry... I only—” The girl, who seemed of about Derry’s own age, was very pretty and very frightened. “A man—” Again speech failed her, and she swayed hazardously on her feet. “You see, I was alone, and—”

But by this time Derry had collected himself and stood up. “I’m afraid you’ve been upset,” he said. “Sit down and take it easy. Nothing more can happen now.”

The girl sat down — but not without a glance around the empty compartment. Derry guessed that she badly felt the need of some person of her own sex. “Thank you,” she said.

This time she had tried to smile as she spoke. But her eyes remained scared. It suddenly occurred to Derry that part of the nastiness of what had presumably happened must be in its anonymous quality.

“My name is Derry Fisher,” he said. “I work for an estate agent in London, and I’ve been down to Sheercliff on a job. I caught this train so as to be back in the office after lunch.”

Whether or not the girl took in this prosaic information Derry was unable to tell. Certainly she did not, as he had hoped, do anything to supply her own biography. Instead, she produced a handkerchief and blew her nose. Then she asked a question in a voice still barely under control. “I suppose I must look an utter fool?”

Derry resisted the temptation to say that, on the contrary, she looked quite beautiful. It mightn’t, in the circumstances, be in terribly good taste. So he contented himself with shaking his head.

“Not a bit,” he said. “And I wish I could help in any way. Did you have any luggage in the compartment you had to leave? If you did, may I fetch it for you?”

“Thank you very much.” The girl appeared steadied by this unexciting proposal. “I have a green suitcase, and the compartment is the last one in this coach. But first I should tell you about the man.”

Derry doubted it. He knew that, unless the man had been so tiresome that he ought to be arrested, it would be wise that no more should be said. The girl could tell her mother or her best friend later in the day. She would only regret blurting things to a strange man.

“Look here,” he said, “I wouldn’t bother about the chap any more — not unless you feel it’s only fair to other people to bring in the police at Waterloo. In that case I’ll see the guard. But at the moment I’ll fetch the suitcase. And you can think it over.”

“I don’t think you understand.”

Derry paused, his hand already on the door to the corridor. “I beg your pardon?”

“Please stop — please listen.” The girl gave a sharp laugh that came out unexpectedly and rather uncomfortably. “I see I’ve been even more of a fool than I thought. You’ve got the — the wrong impression. The man didn’t—”

Suddenly she buried her face in her hands and spoke savagely from behind them. “It was nothing. I imagined it. I must be hysterical.”

Derry, who had sat down again, kept quiet. He knew that women do sometimes get round to imagining things. This girl didn’t seem at all like that. But no doubt it was a trouble that sometimes took hold of quite unexpected people.

“I mean that I imagined its importance. I certainly didn’t imagine the thing. Nobody could have a... a hallucination of that sort.”

As if nerving herself, the girl put her hands down and looked straight at Derry. “Could they?”

It was Derry who laughed this time — although he could scarcely have told why. “Look here,” he said. “I think I have misunderstood. What was it?”

“It was his shoes.”

For a moment the girl’s glance was almost helpless, as if she was aware of the absurd anti-climax that this odd statement must produce.

“It was something about his shoes.”

The engine shrieked, and the express plunged into a tunnel. In the wan electric light which had replaced the early summer sunshine, Derry stared at the girl blankly.

“You mean — this isn’t about anything that happened?”

“No — or yes and no.” For a moment the girl appeared to struggle for words. Then she squared herself where she sat. “May I tell you the whole thing?”

“Please do — I’m awfully curious.” Derry spoke sincerely. The story, whatever it might be, was not going to be an awkward chronicle of attempted impropriety. “You did say shoes?”

“Yes. A brown shoe and a black one.”

The train had returned to daylight. This did not prevent Derry Fisher from a sensation of considerable inner darkness. “You mean that this man—”

“Yes. He is wearing one brown shoe and one black... How incredibly trivial it sounds.”

“I don’t know. It’s not a thing one ever sees.”

“Exactly!” The girl looked gratefully at Derry. “And when you see it, it gives you a shock. But the real shock was when he saw that I saw it. You see?”

Derry smiled. “Not really. Hadn’t you better start at the beginning?”

“The beginning was at Sheer-cliff. I thought I’d only just catch the train myself, but this man cut it even finer than I did. He tumbled in just as we started to move. With any sort of baggage he couldn’t have managed it. But he had nothing but a brief case.”

“Is he tidily dressed apart from this business of the shoes?”

The girl considered. “He certainly isn’t noticeably untidy. But what chiefly strikes me about his clothes is that they look tremendously expensive. He’s in the sort of tweeds that you could tell a mile off, and that must be terribly good if they’re not to be ghastly.”

“Is he a loud sort of person himself?”

“Not a bit. He’s middle-aged and intellectual-looking, and quite clearly one of nature’s First Class passengers. I think he jumped into a Third in a hurry and hasn’t bothered to change. He simply put his brief case down beside him — there were only two of us in the compartment — and disappeared behind The Times.

“I had a book, and I didn’t do much more than take a glance at him. It wasn’t perhaps for half an hour that I noticed the shoes. They gave me a jar, as I’ve said. And although I went on reading, the queerness of it stuck in my head. So presently I had another look, just to make sure I hadn’t been mistaken. And as I looked, he looked. That is to say, he happened to glance over The Times, saw the direction of my eyes, and followed it.

“What he discovered was a terrific shock to him. His legs jerked as if he’d been stung, and his feet made a futile effort to disappear beneath the seat. I looked up in surprise and just caught a glimpse of his face before he raised The Times again. He had gone a horrible gray, as if he was going to be sick. It made me feel a bit sick myself. And matters didn’t improve when he turned chatty.”

“But not, surely, about the shoes?”

“Yes, about the shoes. He put down his paper and apologized for them — just as if the compartment was my drawing room and he felt that he had come into it too casually dressed.”

“He made a kind of joke of it?”

“That was what he seemed to intend. But he was very nervous. He was smoking those yellow cigarettes — aren’t they called Russian? — and he kept stubbing out one and lighting another. He asked me if the shoes made him look like an absent-minded professor.”

“And what did you say to that?” Derry guessed that it was doing the girl good to talk about her queer encounter. And it sounded merely eccentric rather than sinister. Presently she ought to be able to see it as that.

“I said it didn’t, somehow, look like a thing which absent-mindedness would explain. I said it ought to, that it was the sort of thing one might make an absent-minded person do in a story; but that when one actually saw it, that just didn’t seem to fit.”

Derry Fisher smiled. “You gave him quite good value for his money. It was what might be called a considerable reply.”

“Perhaps. But he didn’t like it.” To Derry’s surprise the girl’s agitation was growing again. “I suppose I was tactless to do more than murmur vaguely. He stubbed out another cigarette, and I felt a queer tension suddenly established between us. It was a horrid sensation. And what he said next didn’t at all ease it. He said I was quite right, and that he wasn’t at all absent-minded. He was color blind.”

Derry was puzzled. “That’s certainly a bit odd. But I don’t see—”

“I happened to know that it was almost certainly nonsense.”

This time the girl sounded slightly impatient; and Derry decided, quite without resentment, that she was cleverer than he was. “I’m not absolutely certain that color blindness of that sort doesn’t exist. But I know that anything other than the ordinary red-green kind is excessively rare. So this was a very tall story. And, of course, I had another reason for disbelieving him. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Derry stared. “I’m afraid I don’t at all know.”

“If this man is unable to distinguish between black and brown, he couldn’t possibly have received such a shock the moment his glance fell on his shoes. Don’t you see?”

“Yes — of course.” Derry felt rather foolish. “And what happened then?”

“This time I didn’t say anything. I felt, for some reason, really frightened. And I was even more frightened when I detected him cautiously trying the handle of the door.”

“The door to the corridor?”

“No. The door on the other side.”

Derry Fisher, although not brilliant, had a quick instinct for the moment when action was desirable.

“Look here,” he said, “it’s about time I had a look.”

And with a reassuring glance at his companion he rose and stepped into the corridor.

They were moving at considerable speed and had been doing so steadily since some time before the beginning of his encounter with the frightened girl. He walked up the train in the direction she had indicated, glancing into each compartment as he passed. In one there was a group of young airmen, mostly asleep; in another a solitary lady of severe appearance seemed to be correcting examination papers; in a third an elderly clergyman and his wife were placidly chatting.

Derry came to the last compartment and saw at a glance that it was empty.

Conscious of being both disappointed and relieved, he stepped inside. The girl’s green suitcase was on the rack. On the opposite seat lay an unfolded copy of The Times. There were three yellow cigarette butts on the floor. The window was closed.

Derry felt obscurely prompted to make as little physical impact on the compartment as might be. He picked up the suitcase and went out, shutting the corridor door behind him.

The girl was still sitting where he had left her, and he set the suitcase down beside her. “He’s gone,” he said.

“Gone! You don’t think—”

“It’s very unlikely that anything nasty has happened.” Derry was reassuring. “The window is closed, and he couldn’t have chucked himself out without opening the door. In that case, it would be open still. Nobody clinging to the side of the train could get it shut again, even if he wanted to. Your tiresome friend has just made off to another carriage. It’s the end of him — but quite harmlessly.”

“He could only have gone in the other direction, or we’d have seen him.”

“That’s perfectly true. But he naturally would go off in the opposite direction to yourself. And the greater length of the train lies that way. It’s more crowded, too, at that end. He realizes that he’s made an ass of himself, and he’s decided to submerge himself in the crush.”

The girl nodded. “I suppose you’re right. But I haven’t really told you why I bolted.” She hesitated. “It’s too fantastic — too silly. I didn’t think he had any notion of killing himself. I rather thought he was meaning to kill me.”

The girl laughed — and it was her unsteady laugh again. “Isn’t it a disgusting piece of hysteria P It must mean that my subconscious mind just won’t bear looking into.”

“Rubbish.” Derry felt it incumbent to speak with some sternness. “This chap is a thoroughly queer fish. It was perfectly reasonable to feel that he might be quite irresponsible. You say he actually began fiddling with the door-handle?”

“Yes. And I really thought that he was thinking out what you might call two co-ordinated movements — getting the door open and pitching me through it. And when I did get up and leave, I felt that it was a terrific crisis for him. I sensed that he was all coiled up to hurl himself at me — and that he decided in the last fraction of a second that it wouldn’t do.”

The girl stood up. “But this is all too idiotic. And at least I already see it as that — thank goodness.” She smiled rather wanly at Derry. “I shall go along and try the effect of a cup of coffee.”

“May I come too?”

“I’d rather you didn’t. But you’ve already been terribly kind. You’ve helped me pull myself together. It’s just that I feel I can finish the job better alone.”

Left in solitude, Derry Fisher reflected that he had learned very little about the girl herself — nothing at all, indeed, except the disturbing episode in which she had found herself involved. Might he, when she returned, ask for her name — or at least attempt a more general conversation?

The probability was that he would never see her again; and this was a fact which he found himself facing with lively dissatisfaction. Her appearance in his compartment had been the sort to make his imagination expect some further succession of strange events, some romantic sequel.

But when the girl did return, her own manner was notably prosaic. Coffee and reflection seemed further to have persuaded her that she had already dramatized an insignificant circumstance too much. She remained grateful and talked politely. But Derry guessed that she felt awkward, and that at Waterloo she would be glad to say goodbye, both to him and to the whole incident.

So he forebore to make any suggestion for the bettering of their acquaintance. Only when the train reached the terminus he insisted on accompanying her through the barrier and to the taxi rank. The man who had scared her — the man with the black and brown shoes — must be somewhere in the crush; and if, as seemed likely, he was crazy, there was a possibility that he might bother her again.

But they caught no sight of him.

The girl gave an address in Kensington and stepped into her cab. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

Derry took his dismissal with a smile. “Goodbye,” he said. “At least, you’re safe and sound.”

Her eyes widened, and then laughed at him. “Yes, indeed. He can’t dispatch me now.”

The cab moved off. Derry, stepping forward to wave regardless of the traffic, was nearly bowled over by one of the next cabs out; inside it, he glimpsed a man’s amused face as he skipped nimbly to safety. He had been in danger, he saw, of making an ass of himself over that girl. He hurried off to catch a bus...

Shortly after lunch Derry went in to see his uncle — at present his employer, and soon, he hoped, to be his partner. Derry sat on one corner of his uncle’s desk — a privilege which made him feel slightly less juvenile — and gave an account of himself. He described his few days at Sheercliff and his labors there on behalf of the firm.

His uncle listened with his customary mingling of scepticism and benevolent regard, and then proceeded to ask his customary series of mild but formidably searching questions. Eventually he moved to less austere ground. Had Derry got in any tennis? Had he found the usual agreeable persons to go dancing with?

On these topics, too, Derry offered what were by now prescriptive replies, whereupon his uncle buried his nose in a file and gave a wave which Derry knew was meant to waft him from the room.

All this was traditional. But as he reached the door his uncle looked up again. “By the way, my dear boy, I see you left Sheercliff just before the sensation there.”

“The sensation, Uncle?” Only vaguely interested Derry saw his relative reach for a newspaper.

“An unidentified body found on the rocks in mysterious circumstances — that sort of thing.”

“Oh.” Derry was not much impressed.

“And there was something rather unaccountable. Now, where did I see it?” Derry’s uncle let his eye travel over the paper now spread out before him. “Yes — here it is. The body was fully dressed. But it was wearing one black shoe and one brown... My dear boy, are you ill? Too many late nights, if you ask me.”

At nine o’clock that morning — it was his usual hour — Superintendent Lort had come on duty at Sheercliff Police Station and found Captain Merritt waiting for him. The circumstance gave Lort very little pleasure. He was an elderly man, soon to retire; and he had felt from the first that Merritt belonged to a world that had passed beyond him.

Merritt was an ex-army officer, and so to be treated with decent respect. His job was that of bodyguard — there could be no other name for it — to a certain Sir Stephen Borlase, who had been staying for some weeks at the Metropole Hotel. It was not apparent to Lort why Borlase should require protection other than that provided by the regular police.

Merritt, it appeared, was paid by the great industrial concern whose principal research chemist Borlase was. But it was an important Ministry that had yanked Merritt out of one of the regular Security Services and seconded him to the job. Borlase’s research, it seemed, was very much a work of national importance. And so there was this irregular arrangement. This most irregular arrangement, Lort said to himself now — and greeted his visitor with a discouraging glare.

“Borlase has vanished.” Merritt blurted out the words and sat down uninvited. He looked like a man whose whole career is in the melting pot. Probably it was.

“Vanished, sir? Since when?”

“Well, since last night — or rather very early this morning. I saw him then. But now he’s gone. His bed hasn’t been slept in.”

“Do I understand, Captain Merritt, that it is part of your... um... employment to visit Sir Stephen Borlase’s bedroom before nine a.m., and at once to communicate with the police if he isn’t found there?”

“Of course not, man. The point is that he hasn’t slept there. And that needs inquiring into at once.”

“But surely, sir, such an inquiry is what you are... er... paid for?”

“Certainly. But I naturally expect the help of the police.” Merritt was plainly angry. “Borlase is a damned important man. He is working now on the devil knows what.”

“That probably describes it very well.” And Lort smiled grimly. “But are we to raise an alarm because this gentleman fails to sleep in his hotel? I know nothing of his habits. But the fact that he has been provided with a somewhat unusual... um... companion in yourself, suggests to me that he may not be without a few quiet eccentricities.”

“He’s a brilliant and rather unstable man.”

“I see. But this is not information that has been given us here in our humdrum course of duty. Do I understand it is thought possible that Sir Stephen may bolt?”

Merritt visibly hesitated. “That’s not for me to say. I am instructed merely to be on guard on his behalf. And you, Superintendent, if I am not mistaken, have been instructed to give me any help you can.”

“I have been instructed, sir, to recognize your function and to cooperate. Very well. What, in more detail, is the position? And what do you propose should be done?”

“Part of the position, Superintendent, I think you already know. Sir Stephen is here as a convalescent, but in point of fact he can’t be kept from working all the time. Apparently his stuff is so theoretical and generally rarefied that he can do it all in his head, so all he needs to have about him is a file or two and a few notebooks.

“He has been pottering about the beach and the cliffs during the day, as his doctors have no doubt told him to do. And then, as often as not, he has been working late into the night. It has made my job the deuce of a bore.”

“No doubt, sir.” Lort was unsympathetic. “And last night?”

“He sat up until nearly one o’clock. I have a room from which I can see his windows, and it has become my habit not to go to bed myself until he seems safely tucked up. You can judge from that how this job has come to worry me. Well, out went his lights in the end, and I was just about to undress when I heard him open the outer door of his suite.

“He went downstairs. It seemed to me I’d better follow; and when I reached the hall, there he was giving a nod to the night porter and walking out of the hotel. He hadn’t changed for dinner, and in his tweeds he might have been a visitor leaving the place for good. He was merely bent, however, on a nocturnal stroll.”

“It was a pleasant night, no doubt.” Lort offered this comment impassively.

“Quite so. Sir Stephen’s proceeding was no more than mildly eccentric. But if I’d let him wander off like that in the small hours, and if anything had happened, it would have been just too bad for both of us. So I took that stroll too — some fifty yards in the rear.

“He went straight through the town and took the short cliff path out to Merlin Head. It’s an extremely impressive spot in full moonlight, with the sheer drop to the sea looking particularly awe-inspiring, I imagine. Of course there was nobody about. And as there is only the one narrow path to the Head, I didn’t follow him to the end of it. He doesn’t like being dogged around.”

“I’m not surprised.” Lort was emphatic. “I don’t know what things are coming to that such antics should be considered necessary in a quiet place like this. But go on.”

“You will remember that there’s a little shelter on the verge of the Head, with a bench from which you can command the whole sweep of the bay. Borlase disappeared into that, but didn’t sit for long. Within ten minutes he was making his way back towards me — and at that I slipped out of sight and followed him discreetly back to the hotel.

“Perhaps I should mention having a feeling that there was something on his mind. His walk out to the Head had been direct and decisive. But on the way back he hesitated several times, as if doing a bit of wool-gathering. So I kept well in the background, and he had gone to his bedroom by the time I re-entered the hotel. I waited, as usual, until his lights were out, and then I turned in.”

“And now, you say, he has vanished?”

“Yes. I’ve got into the way of taking him his letters in the morning. That is how I’ve discovered that he never went to bed at all.”

Lort frowned. “But you say all the lights went out in his suite? Could there have been one still burning when you went to bed yourself — one that wouldn’t be visible to you?”

“I think not.”

“And the night porter? Was he aware of Borlase’s leaving again?”

“No. But he potters around a little, although not supposed to quit the hall. I doubt if it was difficult for Borlase to let himself out unobserved.”

Merritt paused. “And that, Superintendent, is the position now. What do you make of it?”

“I’m far from feeling obliged to make anything of it at all.” Lort allowed himself some tartness in this reply. “Here is a man, devoted to abstruse scientific thought, who takes a reflective stroll at one o’clock in the morning. Moonlight doesn’t help with whatever problem he’s chewing over, so for a time he sits in the dark and tries that.

“Presently he wanders out again, and very probably walks till morning. Eventually he emerges from his abstraction, discovers himself to be uncommonly hungry, breakfasts at the first inn he sees, returns to Sheercliff at his leisure, and finds that the conscientious Captain Merritt has persuaded the police to start a manhunt.”

And Lort favored his visitor with a bleak smile. “The truth may not be precisely that. But my guess is that I’m well within the target area.”

“I see.” Merritt had produced his watch and glanced at it. Now he put it away and turned a cold eye on the elderly and sardonic man before him. “And you think mine a very odd job?”

“I do, sir — decidedly.”

“And so it is, Superintendent. But then Borlase, as it happens, is a very odd man. Just how odd, I think I must now take the responsibility of telling you.”

“I am very willing, sir, to hear anything that makes sense of your anxieties.”

“Very well — here goes.” Merritt paused as if to collect himself. “Perhaps I can best begin by repeating what I have just said — but with a difference. The Borlases are a very odd couple of men.”

Lort stared. “You mean there is a brother — something like that?”

“I mean nothing of the sort. I mean that Sir Stephen Borlase — the man stopping at the Metropole Hotel — is much more easily understood as two people than as one.”

Lort sat back in his chair. “Jekyll and Hyde?”

“Or Hyde and Jekyll. That is undoubtedly the popular expression of the thing, and perhaps the best for laymen like you and me, Superintendent, to hang on to. Or possibly we might think of him as a sort of Hamlet — the man who couldn’t make up his mind.”

“Frankly, sir, I don’t find this easy to believe. I suppose Dr. Jekyll may have been a man of some scientific attainment, but I can’t see Hamlet as an eminent research chemist.”

“Perhaps not.” Merritt took a moment to estimate the cogency of this pronouncement. “But the fact is that Borlase combines immense drive and concentration as a scientist with a highly unstable personality. Commonly his ideological convictions are very much those of any other man of his sort in our society. For the greater part of his days, that is to say, he is completely reliable. But every now and then he is subject to a fit of emotional and intellectual confusion, and from this there emerges for a short time what is virtually a different personality.

“It’s an awkward thing in the days of the cold war, as you can see. Let certain folk effectively contact Borlase when he has swung over to this other polarity — this other set of values — and goodness knows what they might not get out of him. And now I think you can understand why I was given my ‘unusual’ job — and why I think the present situation genuinely alarming.”

“I still feel, sir, that I’ve a good deal to learn.” Lort was clearly preparing to plod doggedly round the strange story with which he had been presented. “Am I to understand that Sir Stephen Borlase is fully aware of his own condition?”

“In a general way — yes. But he plays it down. When normal, he declines to admit that these periods of disturbance go, so to speak, at all deep. He won’t treat himself as potentially a mental case. Nothing in the way of regular visits by the appropriate sort of medical man would be tolerated by him. So he has been persuaded that he is in the first flight of V.I.P.s — as indeed he pretty well is — and provided with—”

“—the new style of guardian angel represented by yourself.” Lort, having given his cautious antagonism this further airing, reached for a scribbling pad as if to indicate that the matter had entered a new phase. “Have you been given to understand that there does now exist against Borlase a specific threat? Are there, in fact, supposed to be persons aware of his condition and actively planning to exploit it?”

“It is thought very likely that there are — particularly a fellow called Krauss.”

“I see. And you have been told what signs to look for in Borlase himself?”

“He is said to go moody, restless, distraught — that sort of thing.”

Lort nodded. “What about the last few days? Has he appeared all right?”

“The devil of it is, Superintendent, that he has always appeared a bit of a queer fish to me. I can’t claim to have noticed any change in the last few days.”

“Then, Captain Merritt, it remains my guess that this is a false alarm. When did you leave the Metropole — half an hour ago? Likely enough, Borlase has returned in the interval. I’ll call the place up and find out.”

Two telephones stood on Lort’s desk — and now, as he was in the act of reaching for one, the second emitted a low but urgent purr.

The Superintendent picked it up. “Yes... Yes... Dead, you say?... Where?”

Lort’s glance, as he listened, fleetingly sought Merritt’s face. “The tide? If that was so, you did perfectly right... Unidentified? I hope he remains so... I said, I hope he remains so... Never mind why... Yes, of course — within ten minutes. Thank you.”

When Lort had snapped down the receiver, there was a moment’s silence. Merritt had gone pale, and when he spoke it was with a curious striving for a casual note. “Not, I suppose, anything to do with—?”

“Probably not.” Lort was on his feet. “Still, you might care to come along — just in case.”

“In case—?”

“In case it is the body of Sir Stephen Borlase that has just been found below Merlin Head.”

“Accident?”

The Superintendent reached for his cap. “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

The sky was almost cloudless, the air filled with a mild warmth, the sea sparkling within its far-flung semicircle of gleaming cliffs. On the front and in the broad tree-lined streets, visitors made their way to and from the baths, the Winter Gardens, the circulating libraries, or exercised well-bred dogs with due regard to the cleanliness and decorum which is so marked a feature of the Sheercliff scene.

As he drove the agitated Captain Merritt through this pleasing pageant, Superintendent Lort discernibly let his spirits rise. But the effect of this was only to give a more sardonic turn to his speech. An accident, he pointed out, whether in the sea or on the cliffs, was an undesirable thing. The City Council deprecated accidents. Accidents were dissuasive; potential visitors read about them and decided to go elsewhere.

But a crime was another matter. Many pious and law-abiding Sheer-cliff citizens would ask for nothing better than a really sensational crime. The present season, it was true, was somewhat early. Even a murder extensively featured in the national Press would have little effect on Metropole or Grand or Majestic folk. But the August crowds — the true annual bearers of prosperity to the town — were another matter. A course of events culminating in the Central Criminal Court in about the third week of July, Superintendent Lort opined, would probably take threepence off the rates.

Captain Merritt showed no appreciation of this unexpected vein of pleasantry in his professional colleague. He sat silent during the drive. He remained silent in the small Police Station which they entered at the end of it. Here a melancholy sergeant led them out to a shed at the back for the purpose, as he expressed it, of viewing the remains. This, however, was for some minutes delayed. With a due sense of climax the sergeant chose to pause in the intervening yard and favor his superior with a fuller account of the case.

An elderly clergyman, early abroad in the interest of birdwatching, had been the first to peer over Merlin Head and see the body. It lay sprawled on an isolated outcrop of rock at the base of the cliff, and only by an unlikely chance had it not fallen directly into the sea. Had this happened, it would probably have disappeared — at least, as an identifiable individual — for good. For the currents played strange tricks on this coast, and it was only after some weeks that the sea commonly rendered up its dead.

On this point the sergeant was disposed to be expansive. “Nibbled, sir — that’s how they often are. Some quite small fish, it seems, are uncommonly gross feeders. But come along.”

On this macabre note the three men entered the shed. The body lay on a long table, covered with a sheet. The sergeant stepped forward and drew back the sheet so that the face was revealed.

“It’s your man, all right.” Lort’s voice was decently subdued.

“It’s my man.” Merritt, very pale, glanced at the sergeant. “Any certainty how it happened?”

“The back of the head’s stove in. He might have been hit, and then thrown over the cliff. Or he might just have jumped and the damage been done by the rocks. The surgeon thinks they’ll be able to tell just which, once they’ve gone into the body more particular.”

“I see.” Merritt moved closer to the body, gave a startled exclamation, and drew the sheet down farther. “It’s Sir Stephen Borlase, all right. But those aren’t his clothes. At least, I never saw him in them.”

Lort frowned. “He wasn’t dressed like this when you followed him last night?”

“He wasn’t in anything like this dark stuff at all. He was in country kit — a tweed with rather a bold pattern.”

“Peculiar.” Lort turned to the sergeant. “Anything on those clothes — a tailor’s label with the owner’s name, for instance?”

“Nothing of the sort, sir. I’d say they were ordinary, good-class, off-the-peg garments. But there’s something queer about the shoes.”

“They don’t fit?” Lort pounced on this.

“It’s not that. It’s this...”

The sergeant, his sense of drama reasserting itself, whipped away the sheet altogether. “Did you ever see a corpse in one black shoe and one brown?”

“Suicide.” Lort had driven halfway back through Sheercliff before he spoke. “Suicide planned so that it could never be proved. Borlase was simply going to disappear. When you followed him last night — or rather early this morning — he was spying out the land. Or it might be better to say the cliff and the sea.”

“Look before you leap?” Merritt was moodily stuffing a pipe.

“Just that. And perhaps he didn’t like what he saw. You told me that he walked up there briskly enough, yet his return to the Metropole was a bit irresolute. But he went through with the thing. Knowing that he had to give you the slip this time, he changed into those anonymous clothes in the dark — which is how he managed to land himself with different-colored shoes.”

“That may be true.” Merritt was suddenly interested. “And the shoes were, in fact, to give him away! It might be one of those odd tricks of the mind — and particularly of a mind like Borlase’s. Part of him didn’t want anonymity and extinction — so he made this unconsciously motivated mistake and betrayal. An instance of what Freud calls the psychopathology of everyday life.”

“No doubt.” Superintendent Lort did not appear to feel that his picture of the case was much strengthened by this speculation. “Well, Borlase slipped out again later, and simply pitched himself over Merlin Head. He reckoned to go straight into the sea and to be drawn out by the current. Later we might or might not have got back an unrecognizable body in unidentifiable clothes. Of course, further investigation may prove me wrong. But I’d say it’s a fair working supposition. Do you agree?”

Without interrupting the business of lighting his pipe, Captain Merritt shook his head. “I don’t see it. Borlase was an odd chap, or I wouldn’t have been given my job. He might, I suppose, feel driven to take his own life. And he might feel the act to be disgraceful — as something to disguise. But why not disguise it as an accident? He had plenty of brains to work out something convincing in that way. Why should he try to make his death look like an unaccountable disappearance?”

“Might it be because he disliked you, sir?”

“What’s that?” Merritt was startled.

“I mean, of course, disliked the way you’d been set on him. He resented having a jailer disguised as a bodyguard — and quite right too, if you ask me.” Lort delivered himself of this sentiment with vigor. “So he resolved to leave you in as awkward a situation as he could. Had he seemed just to clean vanish, you’d have been left looking decidedly a fool.”

“I see.” Merritt digested this view of the matter in silence for some seconds. And when at length he pronounced upon it, it was with unexpected urbanity. “Well, Borlase is dead, poor devil — and it’s a bad mark for me either way. I’ll be quite content myself if your interpretation is accepted by the Coroner.”

“But you doubt whether it will be?”

“I do.” And Merritt puffed at his pipe with a somber frown. “My guess is that there’s more to come out, Superintendent. And probably with more bad marks attached. The country has lost Stephen Borlase. I have a nasty feeling it may have lost something else as well.”

Derry Fisher felt rather like the Bellman. “What I tell you three times is true.” It was just that number of times that he had now told his story: first to his uncle, then at the local Police Station, and now — rather to his awe — to Sir John Appleby, high up in this quiet room in New Scotland Yard.

Appleby himself, Derry saw, must be pretty high up. He was, in fact, a Commissioner. Derry was already guessing that the strange situation in which he found himself involved was important as well as conventionally sensational.

Appleby was not at all portentous. His idea of police investigation appeared to be friendly and at times mildly whimisical conversation. But Derry sensed that he was feeling pretty serious underneath.

“And you say you saw this girl into a taxi? But of course you did. Pretty or not, it was the natural and proper thing for you to do. And then you took the next taxi yourself?”

“No, sir.” Derry shook his head, genuinely amused. “I found my natural level on top of a bus.”

“Quite so. Taxi queues at these big stations are often longer than bus queues, anyway. I suppose there was a queue — streams of taxis going out?”

“Yes, sir. Parts of our train had been pretty crowded. I had to wait a moment while several more taxis shot past. One of them nearly bowled me over.”

“Did you find yourself staring at people’s shoes?”

Derry burst out laughing. “As a matter of fact, I did. I keep on doing it now.”

“You do, indeed. You had a look at mine the instant you entered this room.” And Appleby smiled genially at his embarrassed visitor. “You’d make a good detective, Mr. Fisher, I don’t doubt. And you tell your story very clearly.”

“To tell you the truth, sir, I’m very relieved to find it credited. It seems so uncommonly queer.”

“We get plenty of queer yarns in this place.” Appleby companionably held out a box of cigarettes. “But of yours, as a matter of fact, we have a scrap of confirmation already.”

Derry Fisher sat up eagerly. “You’ve heard from the girl?”

“Not yet — although we ought to hear today, if she ever looks at a newspaper or listens to the radio. Unless, of course—” Appleby checked himself. “What we’ve had is news of an angry traveler at Waterloo, complaining of theft from his suitcase while he was absent from his compartment.”

“Isn’t that sort of thing fairly common?”

“Common enough. But this was on your train from Sheercliff this morning. And what was stolen was a pair of shoes — nothing else. I’ve no doubt that you see the likely significance of that. By the time you had got to Waterloo, there was certainly nobody on your train in the embarrassing position of wearing a discernibly odd pair of shoes. Only the dead body in Sheercliff was still doing that... By the way, have you any ideas about this?”

Derry, although startled, answered boldly. “Yes, sir. At least, I see one way that it might have come about. The two men — this Sir Stephen Borlase who is dead and the man who was on the train — for some reason changed clothes rather hastily in the dark. And they mixed up the shoes.”

Appleby nodded approvingly. “That’s very good. Borlase, as a matter of fact, has been found in clothes which, it seems, can’t be positively identified as his. Correspondingly, the clothes which your girl described as worn by the fellow on the train sound uncommonly like those being worn by Borlase when he was last seen alive. He may, of course, have been dead when the exchange took place. Indeed, that would seem to be the likely way of it. I wonder, now, what it would be like, changing clothes with a dead man — say, with a murdered man — in the dark.”

“I’m sure I’d mix up a good deal more than the shoes.” Derry Fisher’s conviction was unfeigned. “One would have to possess nerves of steel to do so ghastly a thing.”

“Either that or be in an uncommonly tight corner. You’d be surprised at the things that timid or even craven people will brace themselves to when really up against it.”

Appleby paused, then mused, “But aren’t we supposing a darkness that can’t really have been there? Unless, of course, we can place the thing in a cave or cellar or shuttered room.”

“The moonlight!”

“Precisely. I asked myself about that during my last phone call to Sheercliff half an hour ago. There can be no doubt that there was a full moon in an unclouded sky. I daresay you were aware of it yourself.”

“Yes, sir. As a matter of fact, I was dancing in it.”

“Then, there you are.” Appleby appeared much pleased. “Are you fond of Rubens as a landscape painter?”

“Rubens?” Derry felt incapable of this abrupt transition to a polite cultural topic. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about him.”

“He has one or two great things done in full moonlight. Everything marvelously clear, you know, but at the same time largely drained of color.” Appleby chuckled. “If you knocked me out by the light of the moon, Mr. Fisher, you could exchange clothes with me without the slightest difficulty. But you might very well go wrong over brown and black shoes. My guess is that they wouldn’t be indistinguishable to a careful scrutiny, but that they would be the next thing to it... And now I must really go across to Waterloo. I should be greatly obliged if you’d come along.”

“While you investigate?”

“Just that. You might be a great help to me.”

“I’ll certainly come.” Derry stood up — and suddenly a new view of this invitation came to him. “You don’t mean to lose sight of me?”

“That is so.” For the first time Appleby spoke with real gravity. “You may as well know, Mr. Fisher, that this affair may be very serious indeed. Nobody will be lost sight of until it is cleared up.”

“You make me wish I hadn’t lost sight of the girl.”

“I wish you had not. We must face the fact that she is the only person who can identify the man on the train — the living man in the odd shoes.”

Slowly it dawned on Derry. “And I—?”

“You are the only person who can identify the girl, supposing — well, that she is no longer in a position to speak up for herself.”

“You think she may be in danger?”

“I’d like to know who was in the next taxi or two after hers.”

It chanced that the morning train from Sheercliff had been neither broken up nor cleaned through, and a clerk led them to it over what, to Derry, seemed miles and miles of sidings. It stood forlorn, dusty, and dead, in the rather bleak late-after-noon sunshine.

Once aboard, Derry had less difficulty than he had expected in identifying the compartment in which his adventure had begun. It looked very impersonal and uninteresting now. He felt suddenly depressed, and watched with growing scepticism the minutely careful search that Sir John Appleby made.

“This fellow who complained of losing shoes,” Appleby said. “Where was he?”

The clerk consulted some papers. “We have a note of that, sir. It was three carriages down, next to the dining car. The passenger had gone to get himself an early lunch, leaving his suitcase on the seat of the empty compartment. When he got back, he found it open, with the contents tumbled about, and a pair of shoes missing. Of course he has no claim.”

“Except on our interest.” Appleby turned to Derry. “Now, I wonder why our elusive friend didn’t substitute his own troublesome footwear and close the case? That would have given the other fellow a bit of a shock. But perhaps it was no occasion for a display of humor.”

Appleby spoke absently. His glance was still darting about the uncommunicative compartment, as if reluctant to give up. Then he stepped into the corridor and moved up the train.

“A group of airmen,” he said, “mostly asleep. A solitary lady. A clergyman and his wife. Is that right?”

Derry nodded. “Quite right.”

“And then the compartment where your girl made her awkward observation. If you don’t mind, I’ll go into this one alone.”

He did so, and moved about as if the whole place was made of eggshell. Derry watched fascinated. His scepticism was entirely gone. To his own eye the compartment looked blank and meaningless. Yet it suddenly seemed impossible that to so intent and concentrated scrutiny it should not at once yield some decisive fact.

“You can still smell what she called the Russian cigarettes.” Appleby spoke over his shoulder. “And here are the three yellow stubs you saw yourself. I at once produce pill boxes and forceps. Also a pocket lens.”

Derry glimpsed the railway clerk watching wide-eyed as Appleby actually performed these legendary operations. “I sniff. This tobacco — my dear Watson — is manufactured only in Omsk. Or is it Tomsk? At any rate, I distinctly begin to see Red. Only Commissars are ever issued with this particular brand. The plot thickens. The vanished man has a slight cast in his left eye. A joint — one of the lower ones — is missing from his right forefinger...”

On this surprising rubbish Appleby’s voice died away. Regardless of the two men waiting in the corridor, he painfully explored the confined space around him for a further fifteen minutes. When he emerged he was wholly serious. And Derry Fisher thought that he saw something like far-reaching speculation in his eye.

“Those young airmen, Mr. Fisher — you say they were asleep?”

“Not all of them.”

“And the clergyman and his wife?”

“Chatting and admiring the view.”

“On the far side?”

“No, the corridor side.”

“And the solitary lady?”

“She struck me as a headmistress, or something of that sort. She was working at papers.”

“Absorbed in them?”

“Well — not entirely. I think I remember her giving me rather a formidable glance as I went by. You think these people may have seen something important, sir?”

“They are a factor, undoubtedly.” Appleby was glancing at his watch. “I must get back. The mystery of the rifled suitcase is something that we needn’t pursue. What we want is your girl. And there ought to be word of her by now. What would be your guess about her when she reads all this in the papers? Is she the sort who might lose her head or panic and lie low?”

“I’m sure she’s not. She would see it was her duty to come forward, and she’d do so.”

“Kensington, you said — and you absolutely didn’t hear any more?” Appleby had dropped to the line and they were now tramping through a wilderness of deserted rolling stock. “And you gleaned absolutely nothing about her connections — profession, reason for having been in Sheercliff, and so on?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t.” Derry hesitated. “It wasn’t because I didn’t want to. But she’d had this shock, and it would have seemed impertinent—”

“Quite so.” Appleby was curtly approving. “But I wish we had just the beginning of a line on her, all the same.”

Derry Fisher for some reason felt his heart sink. “You really do think, sir, that she may be in danger?”

“Certainly she is in danger. We must find her as soon as we can.”

Back in his room half an hour later, and with Derry still in tow, Appleby was making a long-distance call.

“Stephen Borlase?” The cultivated voice from Cambridge wasted no time. “Yes, certainly. I have no doubt that I count as one of his oldest friends. The news has saddened me very much. A wonderful brain, and on the verge of great things... Mentally unbalanced? My dear sir, we all are — except conceivably at Scotland Yard. I know they were worried about Stephen, but if I were you I’d take it with a pinch of salt. He was not nearly so mad as Mark is if you ask me.”

“Mark?”

“Mark Borlase — Stephen’s cousin. Haven’t you made contact with him?” The voice from Cambridge seemed surprised. “Mark is certainly next of kin... Address? I know only that he lives in a windmill. From time to time I should imagine that he goes out and tilts at it... Precisely — an eccentric. He goes in for unworldliness and absence of mind... The same interests as Stephen? Dear me, no. Mark is literary — wrote a little book on Pushkin, and is a bit of an authority on Russian literature in general. An interesting but ineffective type.”

“Thank you very much.” Appleby was scribbling on a desk pad. “Just one more thing. I wonder if you can tell me anything significant about Sir Stephen’s methods of work?”

“Yes.” The voice from Cambridge took on extra precision. “It happened in his head, and went straight into a small notebook which he kept in an inner pocket. That — and perhaps a few loose papers lying rather too carelessly about — was nowadays pretty well his whole stock-in-trade. I hope that notebook’s safe.”

“So do I. Sir Stephen had a bodyguard who ought to have kept an eye on all that. I expect to reach him at any time. You’d say that the notebook may be very important indeed?”

“My God!” And the telephone in Cambridge went down with a click.

As Appleby dropped his own receiver into place, a secretary entered the room. “A caller, sir — somebody I think you’ll want to see about this Sheercliff affair.”

Derry Fisher was conscious of sitting up with a jerk as Appleby swung round to ask crisply, “Not the girl?”

“I’m afraid not, sir. A cousin of the dead man. He gives his name as Mark Borlase.”

“Bring him in.” Appleby turned back to Derry. “Lives in a windmill and pops up as if he were answering a cue. He may interest you, Mr. Fisher, even though he’s not your girl. So stay where you are.”

Derry did as he was told. Mark Borlase was a middle-aged, cultivated, untidy man. He had a charming smile and restless, tobacco-stained hands. His manner was decidedly vague, and one felt at once that his natural occupation was wool-gathering. Only good breeding and a sense of social duty, Derry guessed, kept him from relapsing into complete abstraction.

“Sir John Appleby? My name is Borlase. They got hold of me from Sheercliff, and asked me to come along and see you here. This about Stephen is very sad. I liked him, and hope he liked me. We had nothing to say to each other, I’m afraid — nothing at all. But he was a good sort of person in his dry way. I’m very sorry that his end should be a matter of policemen and inquests and so forth. I wonder what I can do?”

As he spoke, Mark Borlase produced a pair of glasses from a breast pocket and clipped them on his nose “Perhaps I could identify the body — something like that?”

And Mark Borlase looked slowly round the room, as if confidently expecting a corpse in a corner. Not finding this, he let his glance rest mildly on Derry Fisher instead. “This your boy?”

“Your cousin’s body is naturally at Sheercliff, Mr. Borlase. It has been adequately identified. And this gentleman is not my son” — Appleby smiled faintly — “but Mr. Derry Fisher, who happened to travel up from Sheercliff this morning in circumstances which give him an interest in your cousin’s death.”

“From Sheercliff this morning? How do you do.” And Mark Borlase gave Derry a smile which, for some reason, sent a prickling sensation down the young man’s spine. “You were a friend of poor Stephen’s?”

“No — nothing of that sort. I never knew him. It’s just that on the train I ran across a — another passenger who’d had a queer experience — one that seems to connect with Sir Stephen’s death. That’s why the police arc interested in me.”

“Indeed.” Mark Borlase did not appear to find this ingenuous explanation sufficiently significant to hold his attention. He turned his mild gaze again to Appleby. “They say, you know, that there were times when Stephen wasn’t quite himself.”

“But you have no personal experience of that?”

“I didn’t see him very often. Of course, we corresponded occasionally.”

“About what?”

Mark Borlase seemed momentarily at a loss. “Well — don’t you know — this and that.”

“You said a moment ago that you and Sir Stephen had nothing at all to say to each other. Can you be a little more specific about the this and that which were mentioned in your letters?”

“As a matter of fact” — and Mark Borlase hesitated — “Stephen got me to look at things for him from time to time.”

“Things, Mr. Borlase?”

“Articles in Russian. It’s my subject.”

“I see.” And Appleby nodded. “Articles, that would be, in learned and scientific journals? Sir Stephen’s own stuff?”

“Dear me, no.” Mark Borlase evinced a sort of absent-minded amusement. “I’m a literary person, and would be no good on anything technical. Stephen had his own experts to do all that sort of thing.”

“Philosophy, then — and sociology and so forth? He used you to acquaint himself with untranslated writings of... well, an ideological cast?”

Mark Borlase’s hand moved uneasily. “Is this what they call a security check? But it was matter of that sort. Stephen had an intermittent — but occasionally intense — interest in Communist theory and the like. I’m bound to confess that it irritated me very much. Not the doctrine — I don’t give twopence for one political doctrine or another — but the style. I like my Russian good.”

“You would have viewed with indifference your cousin’s entering upon treasonable courses, but would have deprecated his continued concern with inelegant Russian prose?”

Rather surprisingly, Mark Borlase was on his feet and flushing darkly. “Damn it all, man, you understand the conversation of gentlemen better than that. I don’t give a tinker’s curse, I say, for one or another sort of hot air. But of course I wouldn’t have a kinsman make a fool of himself and disgrace the family if I could help it. I used to translate or explain whatever rubbish Stephen in these occasional fits sent along — and do my best to laugh at him for his pains.”

“And you were never seriously uneasy?”

Mark Borlase’s hesitation was just perceptible. “Never. I realize there has been a certain amount of sinister talk. Stephen himself told me that some fool of a Cabinet Minister had decided he was a dangerously split personality, and that Stephen had been plagued with a lot of nonsense as a result. For all I know, such idiocy may have driven Stephen to suicide.”

“I sincerely hope not.” Appleby’s tone was sober. “And I am sorry, Mr. Borlase, to have had to sound you on some rather unpleasant ground. It was good of you to come along so quickly. One of my assistants may want a little routine information at your convenience in a day or two. At the moment I have only one further question. When did you see your cousin last?”

This time Mark Borlase answered promptly. “Six weeks ago. And he was perfectly well. I’m at the Wessex, by the way, should you want me.”

“Thank you very much.”

For some moments after the door closed on Mark Borlase there was silence. Appleby sat quite still, lost in thought. Then he turned to Derry. “Well?”

“I’ve seen him before.”

“What!”

“I’ve seen him before. It came to me when he smiled. I’ve seen him quite recently.”

“Be careful, man.” Appleby had sat up at his desk, square and severe. “This sort of thing is new to you — and sometimes it sets people to fancying things. We don’t want a false scent. So think.”

Derry’s mouth was dry and he guessed that he looked strange. For a full minute he, too, sat quite still. “I know I’ve seen him recently — and it connects with Sheercliff.”

“Mark may be like Stephen in personal appearance. And you may have caught a glimpse of Stephen down there in the streets.”

“No — I’ve seen him.” Derry felt his heart pounding. “In a taxi... smiling... driving out of Waterloo today.”

Sir John Appleby appeared quite unsurprised. “That is capital. It looks as if we are on the track of something at last. Let us suppose that you are not mistaken. The overwhelmingly probable inference is that Mark Borlase has himself been down to Sheercliff, and indeed traveled hack by the same train as yourself.”

“Then he lied, didn’t he? He said he hadn’t seen his cousin for six weeks.”

“It certainly sounds like a lie. But he may have gone down intending to see Stephen, and then for some reason changed his mind. You didn’t manage to see how he was dressed?”

Derry shook his head. “I’m afraid not. He may have been in those tweeds of Stephen’s. All I saw was his face — leaning forward, and rather amused that I had to skip out of the way of his cab. But look here, sir” — Derry was suddenly urgent — “it was the cab immediately behind the girl’s. Could he have followed it, and tracked her down? Can one really tell a taxi driver to do that? It’s always happening in stories.”

Appleby smiled. “Certainly one can. Men occasionally want to follow girls without necessarily having it in mind to commit murder. You can imagine cases in which the motive might even be laudable. And most taxi drivers wouldn’t mind a bit of a chase. Try it, some time.”

Derry, although accustomed by now to the intermittent levity of the Commissioner, was rather shocked. “But, sir, oughtn’t we... I mean, if there’s a chance he knows where to find her—”

“Quite so. One or two arrangements must certainly be made.” Appleby was scribbling as he spoke, and now he touched a bell. “Here they are.” He held up a sheet of paper and then handed it to his secretary. “See that this is acted on at once, Hunt, please. And are there any developments?”

“Captain Merritt just arrived, sir.”

“Excellent. Show him in.” Appleby turned to Derry. “The man who knows all about the Sheercliff end. It will be a bad business if we don’t get somewhere now.” He frowned. “And also, perhaps, if we do.”

Captain Merritt was military, brisk, and (Derry suspected) inwardly somewhat shattered. He listened to what Appleby had to say, nodded an introduction to the young man, and plunged straight into his own narrative.

“I waited in Sheercliff for the doctors to make up their minds. It seems there can be no doubt about what happened, and that the local man’s notion of suicide is all wrong. Borlase was killed by a terrific blow on the head, and then within a few minutes was pitched over the cliff. I’ve tried to get medical help on the clothes. You know how scalp wounds, even when only superficial, bleed in a profuse and alarming way? I wondered if the clothes he was wearing when killed would remain wearable and presentable.”

Appleby nodded. “A good point.”

“But the leeches won’t be positive one way or the other. It isn’t certain there would have been any great mess. It’s my bet now that the murderer stripped the dead man of his clothes and got him into the ones he was found in.”

“I agree.” Appleby was incisive. “But why? What was the situation?”

“I was the situation, if you ask me.” And Merritt laughed, but without much mirth. “As I see it now, the murder happened not on a second trip of Sir Stephen’s to Merlin Head, but on the first and only trip. I saw Sir Stephen go up there. I thought I saw him come down. But all I really saw were his clothes. In fact, I came a first-class crash.”

“It’s certainly a possibility.” Appleby spoke with a hint of professional commiseration. “And can you name the man who fooled you?”

“Krauss.”

Appleby nodded. “I gather he may be involved. The Minister made a great point of it when he phoned me this morning.”

“You see, Krauss—” Merritt hesitated. “Is Mr. Fisher here interested in Krauss?”

Appleby smiled. “I don’t think it will much endanger the country, Mr. Fisher, to tell you about Krauss. He is a foreign agent whom we suspect of specializing in approaching scientists with the object of extracting secret information from them. Krauss’s is the ideological and not the venal approach. We don’t know that he has ever had much success. But it is believed that he keeps on trying. And Captain Merritt is perfectly correct in saying that Krauss is supposed to have been on the track of Sir Stephen Borlase. So Krauss is a likely suspect enough.”

Appleby turned to his colleague. “Fisher and I, as it happens, have another one. But carry on.”

“Another suspect?” Merritt was startled.

“Not a bad one. But first come, first served. So continue.”

Merritt laughed. “Very well. Here is the crime as I see it. Stephen Borlase was an unstable fellow, with fits in which he didn’t very well know his own mind on certain vital matters. As a result, Krauss got a long way with him — got, in fact, as far as Merlin Head in the small hours of this morning.

“He persuaded Borlase to an appointment there — to a moonlight conference in the little shelter by the cliff edge. The meeting, however, was a failure. Borlase was not disposed, after all, to see treason as a higher duty. Conceivably he never was. These, after all, are jumpy times. If they were not, some of us would be out of a job.”

“Quite so.”

“Krauss, then, was stuck. And, being stuck, he struck.” Merritt paused, as if mildly surprised at his own command of the resources of English. “Primarily he was out to suborn Borlase. But there was this other possibility. Borlase carried on his person notes that were the vital growing point of his researches. These would be enormously worth stealing — and particularly if the brain capable of producing them could simultaneously be destroyed forever. That is why Krauss killed Borlase.”

“If he did.”

“I’m only putting a case.” Merritt was patient. “Now, what would be the first thing one would do after committing murder and robbery? I think one would scout around. Krauss took a peer out from that cliff shelter — and just glimpsed me at the far end of the path leading to it. He would realize the situation and see that is was pretty grim.”

“Grim enough to take the fantastic risk of donning Borlase’s clothes and hoping to evade you that way?”

“Yes. And it wasn’t really so fantastic. He would know I was being as unobtrusive as possible, and that I would keep well back.”

“It’s a first-class hypothesis.” Appleby drummed absently on the desk before him. “But one point worries me. Borlase was found in entirely strange clothes? Why a complete exchange? And why bother to redress the corpse at all?”

“Krauss suddenly tumbled to the significance of the cliff, the sea, and the currents. With luck, he could get rid of the body for days or weeks. That would be valuable in itself. Moreover, if it was then recovered entirely unidentifiable, either in its own person or by any of its clothes, the eminent Sir Stephen Borlase would simply have disappeared without explanation. There was a neat little propaganda trick to take in that.”

“Very well. Krauss — or another — effects this change of clothes and then pitches the body into the sea. Or rather, not into the sea. It lands on a small outcrop of rock. And so the murderer’s plan — as you see it, that is — partly fails. Now, there is a point that occurs to me there. Suppose the murderer, for some reason, was — so to speak — aiming not at the sea but at that rock. Would it have been a practical target? Could he have reckoned on keeping the body from the sea?”

Merritt frowned. “I’m not clear about the bearing of your question.”

“Conceivably it has none. But one ought, I think, to consider the question Accident or design? on every occasion that one possibly can.”

“I entirely agree.” Merritt thought for a moment. “Yes, I think the rock would prove, if one experimented, a reasonably easy target.”

“Well, then — let’s go on. The disguised Krauss, with Borlase’s notebook in his pocket, does succeed in getting past you.”

“I’m afraid so. But he is by no means out of the wood. There I am, discreetly behind him. If he wants to avoid suspicion, there is only one natural thing for him to do at the end of this nocturnal stroll. He must return to Borlase’s hotel. He must accept the risk of being confronted, face on, by a night porter. Moreover, he probably has no more than Borlase’s key as a clue to what room he must make for. And he must find it before I, in my turn, regain the Metropole.”

“In fact, it was all pretty sticky — without knowing it he had made the ghastly slip-up over the shoes and was now wearing one of Borlase’s and one of his own.”

“Exactly. But he did get to Borlase’s suite quite safely. Later he crept out again and took the first train to Town. He can’t, I think, have had any base in Sheercliff, or he would have made for it first and got into other clothes.”

Derry Fisher had listened fascinated to this hypothetical reconstruction of events in which he himself had been obscurely involved. Now he broke in. “This man Krauss, sir — have you ever seen him?”

Merritt nodded. “Certainly. I was given an unobtrusive view of a good many of his kidney when I took on my present job.”

“Could he be described as middle-aged and intellectual-looking; and does he smoke Russian cigarettes?”

“I don’t know about his smoking, although there are people who will. But the description certainly fits.”

“It certainly fits.” Appleby nodded thoughtfully. “But then — it would fit Mark Borlase as well.”

“Mark Borlase?” Merritt was puzzled.

“Stephen’s cousin. They don’t seem to have briefed you on the family, Merritt, quite as they should. Mark Borlase appears to have traveled up from Sheercliff today, although he has kept quiet about it. Fisher here saw him at Waterloo — and believes that he may even have followed the taxi of the girl who spotted the shoes. When I hear of anybody claiming actually to have seen your friend Krauss there, I shall begin to take rather more interest in him.

“Meanwhile, I’ll keep my eye on Cousin Mark. You don’t happen to be a member of the Wessex? A pity. He told us he’s putting up there for the night. You could have taken a peep at him for yourself.”

“I’m going to do my best to take a peep at Krauss.” Captain Merritt rose. “I haven’t much hope for that notebook — but one never knows. These fellows have peculiar ways. He may hold on to it till he gets his price.”

“There’s some comfort in that. Or Mark Borlase may.”

Merritt moved to the door. “I think your Mark Borlase is a rank outsider.”

“Fisher and I have our money on him, all the same.”

When Merritt had departed, Appleby looked at his watch. “I wonder,” he asked, “if you would care for a cup of tea? We make astonishing tea at the Yard. And capital anchovy toast.”

“Thank you very much.” Derry Fisher was disconcerted. “But oughtn’t we—?”

Appleby smiled. “To be organizing the siege of the Wessex — or otherwise pushing effectively about? Well, I think we have an hour to relax in.”

Derry stared. “Before... before something happens?”

“Before — my dear young man — we take a long shot at finally clearing up this odd business of a dead man’s shoes.”

“A black shoe and a brown — how very curious!”

“What did you say?” Jane Grove set down her teacup with a surprising clatter.

“And — dear me! — at Sheercliff.” Jane’s aunt, enjoyably interested, reached for a slice of cake. “You might have run into it. Which just shows, does it not? I mean, that in the midst of life we are in death. I’ve got a whole cherry.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jane’s voice trembled slightly.

“Something in the paper, dear,” Jane’s aunt propped the folded page against the milk jug. “A poor man found dead beneath the cliffs quite early this morning.”

“Early this morning!”

“And something about another man. Will you have a third cup?”

“No. Go on.”

“I intend to, dear. I always take three cups.”

“I mean about the other man.”

“The other man? Oh, yes. He seems to have traveled on a train, and to have worn mixed-up shoes too. There are people at Scotland Yard who want any information about him.”

“May I see?” Jane took the evening paper and read without speaking.

“It couldn’t be a new fashion?”

“A new fashion, aunt?”

“Wearing different-colored shoes. Two men, you see. But one — of course — now dead.”

Jane laughed a little wildly. “No — not a new fashion.” She got abruptly to her feet. “I think I must—”

“Yes, dear?”

Jane hesitated. “I must water the pot. You might like a fourth cup.”

She performed this commonplace action with a steady hand, and when she spoke again her tone was entirely casual. “I’m afraid I have to go out.”

“To go out again, Jane — after your long day?”

“I... I’ve got to do something I forgot. It’s rather important.” Jane fetched her handbag and gloves. “I don’t suppose I shall be very long.”

“Very well, dear. But don’t forget — you can’t be too careful.”

Jane Grove jumped. “Careful?”

“Of the traffic, dear. So dangerous nowadays.”

Jane, standing by the window, smiled wryly. The quiet Kensington road was deserted. She lingered for some minutes. Then, as if reproaching herself for some lack of resolution, she hurried out.

Sir John Appleby’s tea and anchovy toast, although it had all the appearance of being a leisurely and carefree affair, had a steady accompaniment of messages dispatched and received. Finally, Appleby’s secretary came in and spoke with a trace of excitement.

“Fifteen Babcock Gardens, sir. And at five forty five.”

“Good.” Appleby rose briskly. “He did as he was told, and said he’d walk?”

“Yes. He’s making for the Green Park now.”

“That gives us all very good time. You’ve got three cars out?”

“They should be pretty well posted by now. We’ve studied the maps and had a report from the section.” Appleby nodded and signaled to Derry Fisher to follow him. “And what sort of problem does this house in Babcock Gardens look like presenting?”

“Tricky, sir — but it might be worse. At a corner, but very quiet. All the houses there have basements with areas. There’s a deserted cabmen’s shelter over the way.” The secretary hesitated. “Are you taking a bit of a risk, sir?”

“That’s as it will appear.” Appleby’s tone suggested that he found this question not wholly in order. “And now we’ll be off.”

“You car’s outside, sir — with the short-wave tested and correct.”

Below, a discreetly powerful limousine was waiting, and into this Derry Fisher found himself bundled. It had a table with street plans, and it was filled with low-pitched precise speech. Appleby had no sooner sat down than he joined in. The effect, as of an invisible conference, was very exciting.

Derry had been involved in this sort of thing before — but only in the cinema. He rather expected the car to go hurtling through London with a screaming siren. The pace, however, proved to be nothing out of the ordinary. Turning into the Mall, they moved as sedately as if in a procession. Carlton House Terrace seemed to go on forever, and the Royal Standard fluttering above Buckingham Palace drew only very slowly nearer. When they rounded Queen Victoria on her elaborate pedestal and swung round for Constitution Hill, it was at a speed that seemed more appropriate to sightseers than to emissaries of the law.

But if the car dawdled, Derry’s mind moved fast — much faster than it was accustomed to do in the interest of his uncle’s business. He had never heard of Babcock Gardens, but he guessed that it was an address in Kensington — and the address, too, which he had failed to hear the girl giving at Waterloo that morning. And somebody was walking to it — walking to it through the Green Park. And Appleby had acknowledged that the girl was in danger, and Appleby’s secretary had let slip misgivings over the riskiness of what was now going on.

What was now going on?

Quite clearly, the setting of a trap.

Appleby was setting a trap, with the girl as bait.

“I ought to tell you that there may be a little shooting before we’re through with this.”

Derry jumped. Appleby, apparently unconscious of any strain, had murmured the words in his ear. “Shooting, sir — you mean at the girl?”

“But all this is a very long shot.” Appleby had ominously ignored the question. “It mayn’t come off at all. But it’s going to be uncommonly labor-saving if it does... I think we turn out of Knightsbridge at the next corner.”

Derry was silent. He felt helpless and afraid. The crawl continued. Appleby was again absorbed in listening to reports and giving orders. But he had time for one brief aside.

“Complicated, you know. Lurking for lurkers. Requires the policeman’s most catlike tread. Not like marching up and making an arrest in the name of the law.”

Again Derry said nothing; he didn’t feel at all like mild fun. Suddenly the pace increased. Appleby’s dispositions — whatever they were — appeared to be completed.

The car now ran through broad, quiet streets between rows of solidly prosperous-looking houses. Presently it turned left into a narrower road, and then left again into what seemed a deserted mews. And there it drew to a halt.

Appleby jumped out. “The unobtrusive approach to our grandstand seat.”

Derry followed. “A grandstand seat?”

“We are at the back of Babcock Gardens. A surprised but obliging citizen is giving us the run of his dining room. Number fifteen is just opposite.”

It seemed to Derry Fisher afterward that what followed was all over in a flash. The dining room of the obliging citizen was somber and Victorian, and this gave the sunlit street outside, viewed through a large bay window, something of the appearance of a theatrical scene — an empty stage awaiting the entrance of actors and the beginning of an action.

Suddenly it was peopled — and the action had taken place. The house opposite stood at a corner. Round this came the figure of a man, glancing upward, as if in search of a street number.

Derry had time only to realize that the man looked familiar when the door of number 15 opened and a girl came down the steps. It was the girl of Derry’s encounter on the train that morning.

She had almost reached the footpath when she staggered and fell — and in the same instant there came the crack of a revolver shot.

The man was standing still, apparently staring at her intently. Derry could see only his back. But he now knew that it was the back of Mark Borlase.

Borlase took a step forward. Simultaneously another figure leaped across the road — it must have been from the corresponding corner — and made a dash for Borlase. It was Merritt. What he intended seemed to be a flying tackle.

But before he could bring this off, yet another figure dramatically appeared. A uniformed policeman, hurling himself up the area steps of number 15, took the charging Merritt in the flank and brought him crashing to the ground. In an instant there were policemen all over the place.

“Come along.” Appleby touched the horrified Derry Fisher on the arm. They hurried out. Mark Borlase had not moved. Shocked and bewildered, he was looking from one side to the other. On his left, Merritt had been hauled to his feet, and stood collared by two powerful constables.

On his right, still sprawled on the steps of number 15, lay the girl — a pool of blood forming beneath one arm.

Derry ran toward her, his heart pounding. As he did so, she raised herself, and with a groping movement found her handbag. For a moment, and with a queerly expressionless face, she gazed at Merritt and at the men who held him. Then with her uninjured arm she opened her bag, drew out a small glittering object and thrust it in her mouth.

“Stop her!”

Appleby’s cry was too late. Another revolver shot broke the quiet of Babcock Gardens. Incredibly — incredibly and horribly — Derry Fisher’s beautiful girl had blown her brains out.

Later that evening Appleby explained.

“There was never much doubt, Mr. Borlase, that your cousin had been murdered. And clearly the crime was not one of passion or impulse. The background of the case was international espionage. Sir Stephen was killed in order to obtain an important scientific secret and to eliminate the only brain capable of reproducing it. There may have been an attempt — conceivably by the man Krauss — to get at Sir Stephen by the ideological route. But that had certainly come to nothing. You agree?”

Mark Borlase nodded. “Stephen — as I insisted to you — was really perfectly sound. He worried me at times, it is true — and it was only yesterday that I felt I ought to go down and have a word with him. Actually, we didn’t meet. I got him on the telephone and knew at once that there was no question of any trouble at the moment. So I concealed the fact that I was actually in Sheercliff, put up at the Grand for the night, and came back this morning. I ought to have been franker when you challenged me, no doubt.”

“It has all come out straight in the wash, Mr. Borlase. And now let me go on. Here was a professional crime. This made me at once suspicious of the genuineness of any mix-up over those shoes. But they might be a trick designed to mislead. And if that was so, I was up against a mind given to doing things ingeniously. I made a note that it might be possible to exploit that later.

“Now the train. I came away from my inspection of it convinced that the girl’s story was a fabrication from start to finish. The fact stared me in the face.”

Derry Fisher sat up straight. “But how could it? I’ve chewed over it again and again—”

“My dear young man, these things are not your profession. This girl, representing herself as badly frightened, ignored three compartments — in two of which she would have found feminine support and comfort — and chose to burst in on a solitary and suitably impressionable young man of her own age.

“Again, while the mysterious man with the different-colored shoes would certainly have retreated up the train, the rifled suitcase was down the train — the direction in which the girl herself went off unaccompanied, for her cup of coffee.

“Again, the Russian cigarettes had discernibly been smoked in a holder. On one of them, nevertheless, there was a tiny smear of lipstick.”

Appleby turned to Derry. “I think I mentioned it to you at the time.”

“Mentioned it?” Derry was bewildered — and then light came to him. “When you made that silly — that joke about seeing Red?”

“I’m afraid so. Well now, the case was beginning to come clear. Sir Stephen’s body had been dropped on that rock, and not into the sea, deliberately; we were meant to find it in the strange clothes and the unaccountable shoes — otherwise the whole elaborate false trail laid by the girl on her railway journey would be meaningless.

“But why this elaboration? There seemed only one answer. To serve as an alibi, conclusive from the start, for somebody anxious to avoid any intensive investigation. My thoughts turned to Merritt as soon as he produced that streamlined picture of the man Krauss as the criminal.”

Mark Borlase nodded. “And so you set a trap for him?”

“Precisely. But first, let me give you briefly what my guess about Merritt was. He had been offered money — big and tempting money — to do both things: get the notebook and liquidate Sir Stephen. He saw his chance in Sir Stephen’s habit of taking that nocturnal stroll. Last night he simply followed him up to the Head, killed and robbed him, and dressed the body in clothes he had already concealed for the purpose, including the odd shoes.

“Then he dropped the body over the cliff so that it would fall just where it did, returned to the Metro-pole, and telephoned his confederate to begin playing her part on the 8:05 this morning. The girl — her name was Jane Grove — was devoted to him. And she played her part very well — to the end, I’d say.”

For a moment there was silence in Appleby’s room. Then Derry asked a question. “And your trap?”

“It depended on what is pretty well an axiom in detective investigation. A criminal who has — successfully, he thinks — brought off an ingenious trick will try to bring off another, twice as ingenious, if you give him a chance. Still guessing — for I really had no evidence against Merritt at all — I gave him such a chance just as irresistibly as I could.

“The girl, you see, must come forward, and repeat the yarn she had told on the train. That was essential to the convincingness of the whole story. It was, of course, a yarn about encountering a man who doesn’t exist. For this nobody I determined to persuade Merritt to substitute a somebody: yourself, Mr. Borlase. You had been on that train and had concealed the fact.

“I let Merritt have this information. I gave him the impression that I strongly suspected you. I let slip the information that you could be reached at your club, the Wessex. And as soon as Merritt had left I got a message to you there myself, explaining what I wanted and asking you to cooperate. You did so, most admirably, and I am very grateful to you.”

Mark Borlase inclined his head. “A blood hunt isn’t much in my line, I’m bound to say. But it seemed proper that Stephen’s murder should be brought to book.”

Derry Fisher looked perplexed. “I don’t see how Merritt—”

“It was simple enough.” Appleby broke off to take a telephone call, and then resumed his explanation. “Merritt represented himself to Mr. Borlase on the telephone as my secretary and asked him to come to my private address — which he gave as fifteen Babcock Gardens — at five forty-five. He then got in touch with the girl and arranged his trap.” Appleby smiled grimly. “He didn’t know it was our trap too.”

“He was going to incriminate Mr. Borlase?”

“Just that. Remember, you would have been able to swear that you saw Mr. Borlase leaving Waterloo in a taxi just behind the girl. From this would follow the inference that Mr. Borlase had tracked her to her home; and that after his interview here he had decided that he must silence her.”

“But Merritt didn’t himself mean to — to kill the girl?”

“He meant to stage an attempted murder by Mr. Borlase, and to that he must have nerved her on the telephone. It all had to be very nicely timed.”

Mark Borlase suddenly shivered. “He was going to have me arrested, after he had himself winged the girl? He would have said the revolver was mine — that sort of thing?”

“Yes. He may even have meant to kill you, and maintain that it had happened in the course of a struggle or self-defense. Then the girl would have identified you as the man with the odd shoes. And that would have been that.”

“How would he have explained being on the scene — there in Babcock Gardens, I mean — at all?”

“By declaring that I had prompted him to go and have a look at you at your club and that he had spotted you coming out and had decided to shadow you. It would have been some such story as that. He had lost his head a bit, I’d say, in pursuit of this final ingenuity. It was criminal artistry, of a sort. But it was thoroughly crazy artistry as well.”

“And Stephen’s notebook?”

“That telephone call was to say it has been found with Merritt’s things. Merritt thought himself absolutely safe, and he was determined to hold out for the highest possible price.”

Appleby rose. “Well, that’s the whole thing. And we shall none of us be sorry to go to bed.”

As they said goodbye, Derry Fisher hesitated. “May I ask one more question?”

“Certainly.”

“The shooting in Babcock Gardens was an afterthought of Merritt’s — and I think it was the afterthought of a fiend. But why — after you had examined the train and guessed nearly the whole truth — did you tell me that the girl was in danger?”

“She was in danger of the gallows, Mr. Fisher. But at least she has escaped that.”