Smallbone Deceased

‌Chapter Five —Thursday— Time Is of the Essence

How matter presses on me!

What stubborn things are facts

Hazlitt: Table Talk

I

Hazlerigg found Gissel, the police photographer and finger-print man at work in Bob Horniman’s office.

“I’ve done jobs in junk-shops, in Lost Property offices, in warehouses and in the mistresses’ common-room at a girls’ public school,” said Gissel, “but never before in my life have I see one room with quite so much stuff in it.”

“Then thank your lucky stars that you’re in a Horniman office,” said Hazlerigg, looking round at the rows of black boxes, the neat files and the orderly assemblage of folders. “This is child’s play to what you’d find in the office of an ordinary uninhibited solicitor, really it is.”

“It’s all these books,” said Gissel. “In open shelves, too. Anyone might have touched them or brushed against them. They don’t look as if they’ve ever been read.” He picked one down and blew a cloud of black dust off the top. “Queen’s Bench, 1860. Who in Hades would be interested where the Queen put her bottom in 1860?”

Hazlerigg said thoughtfully: “We shan’t be able to let young Horniman come back here until we’ve finished, and that looks as if it may take a bit of time. I think I’d better use this room myself for working in. You’ve done the desk, I take it?”

First came the senior partner, Mr. Birley. In an interview of limited usefulness the most that could be said was that both sides managed to keep their tempers.

It irritated Mr. Birley to see a stranger behind one of his partners’ desks: it irritated him to have to sit himself in the client’s chair: it irritated him unspeakably to have to answer questions instead of asking them.

After fifteen unhelpful minutes Hazlerigg dismissed him and asked for a word with the second partner.

The tubby Mr. Craine was more obliging.

“Ichabod Stokes,” he said, “was a Presbyterian fishmonger. He was one of Abel’s oldest clients.” Seeing a slight look of surprise on the inspector’s face, he added: “I don’t say that he was the sort of client we should have taken on nowadays, but when Abel was starting, way back before the turn of the century, well, he was like every other young solicitor—to him a client was a client. And I don’t think either of them regretted their association. Ichabod, you know, was one of those men who really understand money. He started with one fish-shop in Commercial Road, and when he died he owned almost a quarter of the East Coast fishing fleet.”

“When was that?” Hazlerigg was making an occasional note in his amateur shorthand: notes which would later be expanded into the journal of the case.

“Ichabod died—now let me see—at Munich time, Autumn, 1938. He left a will appointing Abel Horniman and Marcus Smallbone executors and trustees. Why Smallbone? God knows. He and Smallbone had a common passion for collecting pottery, and had met at one or two sales, and struck up some sort of acquaintanceship. And I believe they used to write long letters to each other about ceramics and what-have-you, though between you and me,” said Mr. Craine, with that cheerful vulgarity which is often a characteristic of tubby extroverts, “I don’t think Stokes really knew the difference between the Portland Vase and a pisspot—or that was the impression I got when I had to put his collection on the market after his death. However, that’s by the way. The whole estate, as I said, was left to his trustees on trust for a dozen charities. There was no disputing the will—they were very sound and sensible charities; mostly to do with fish. The Herring-fleet Homes and the Destitute Drifters and so on. He nominated them himself, got us to make certain that they were charities, and had ’em listed, by name, in his will—and if every testator took those simple precautions,” concluded Mr. Craine with feeling—for he, like others of his profession, had suffered from the decision in re Diplock—“the lawyer’s lot would be a very much happier and a very much easier one.”

“So now,” said Hazlerigg, “all you have to do is to divide the income among these charities?”

“In theory, that is so. In fact, there’s more to it than that. Of course, when Ichabod died his estate consisted of a lot of different things. There was real property—he bought a number of farms cheap at the time of the 1931 slump—and there were the assets and the goodwill of his various businesses, which had to be valued and paid out. However, you can take it that by now everything has been realised and invested in securities. In round figures, Ichabod added up to nearly a million pounds. When the death duties had been paid we salvaged just over half a million—and we worked like Trojans to keep that much.” Mr. Craine spoke with genuine feeling. This was one aspect of his work which genuinely appealed to him. Sometimes, indeed, he went so far as to visualise himself as an archangel, a rotund St. Michael, armed with the sword of Dymond and defended by the shield of Green, protecting the helpless from the assault of the massed powers of Darkness, those arch-fiends, the Commissioners of Inland Revenue.

“Half a million,” said Hazlerigg. “And all invested. It will just be a matter of checking the stocks and shares, I take it.”

“There again,” said Mr. Craine, “in theory, yes. In fact, no. I don’t know how much you understand about these things, but a lot depends in any particular trust on the investment clause. It’s much easier, in a way, if you are limited to trustee securities. That’s dull, but fairly straightforward. In this case, we had wider powers. Not absolutely discretionary, but almost so. That meant that we had to keep the fund in the best possible state of investment compatible with security—stop me if I’m confusing you.”

“You are being very clear,” said Hazlerigg. “Please go on.”

“Well, that was Abel’s job—and, if I may say so, he earned his professional retainer a dozen times over. He knew the stock market as well as any broker, and he bought and sold to meet the demands of the day. That’s why it isn’t possible, without looking through all the recent files and folders, to say exactly what the trust fund ought to consist of. I can tell you what it does consist of. I’m having Sergeant Cockerill make a list of the securities at this moment. But most of the accounts which would have told me what it ought to have been—the history of the various investments, as it were—they were in that box.”

“I see,” said Hazlerigg. “Does that mean that you’ll never know—?”

“Oh, no. We’ll find out,” said Mr. Craine. “It’ll just take a little time, that’s all.”

“I see. Let me know what the answer is, please, as soon as you get it.” Hazlerigg thought for a minute and then said: “If Abel Horniman had been embezzling funds, do you think he would have taken them from this trust, or some other one?”

He was watching Mr. Craine as he said this, and found more interest in his reactions than in the actual words of his reply.

One thing was quite evident. Mr. Craine was neither surprised nor shocked at the suggestion. On the contrary, he was plainly very interested in it.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Yes. If he had embezzled money I think this was the trust he would have gone to.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Tell me first.” Mr. Craine looked the chief inspector shrewdly in the eye. “Have you any reason for your question—any grounds for your supposition?”

“None at all,” said Hazlerigg. “The case was purely hypothetical.”

“On those grounds, then,” said Mr. Craine, “I’ll answer it. As a hypothesis only. The Stokes Trust would have been a suitable vehicle for fraud for several reasons. First, because the only other trustee was a layman. Secondly, because the funds were all here, and under our effective control. They had to be. As I explained, Abel was constantly buying and selling; so no question would be asked. Thirdly, the beneficiaries were all charities. The secretary of a charity is, on the whole, so glad to see his annual cheque that he doesn’t usually question its amount very closely. If he was told that all the investments in the trust were showing lower yields, or that some income was being put back for administrative reasons, he would probably accept the explanation without further question—far more readily, anyway, than a private beneficiary whose own pocket was being touched.”

“Yes,” said Hazlerigg. “I see. Thank you. You’ve been very frank. You’ll tell me at once if anything is wrong with the trust fund. In the meantime, perhaps you would ask Mr. Bohun to step along.”

II

Meanwhile, Detective-Sergeant Plumptree had made his way out to Belsize Park and was interrogating Mrs. Tasker.

Sergeant Plumptree was a pink-and-white young man, with the well-scoured look of one who has but recently emerged from his mother’s wash-tub. His methods were unorthodox and some of the results which he achieved surprised even himself.

“Young man,” said Mrs. Tasker, “pour yourself out a second cup of tea, do, and be guided by me. Never take in lodgers. Go to the poorhouse, go to prison, commit arson, larceny and what you like, but never take in lodgers.”

“What—” began Sergeant Plumptree.

“Take this Mr. Smallbone. A quiet man. An inoffensive man. A good payer. Never should I have thought that by his deeds he would have brought anxiety to my bosom and police into my house—the sugar’s behind the clock. Five years ago he came here to lodge. Put down six months’ rent on the table, the one we’re sitting at at this moment, and said to me, ‘Mrs. Tasker, I’m a rolling stone. I gather no moss. But somewhere I must have to lay my head.’ ‘The first floor front pair’s vacant,’ I said, ‘and use of the ring at the back for cooking.’ That’s all that passed between us, if I go to my Maker tonight.”

“Which—” said Sergeant Plumptree.

“It wasn’t as if he didn’t warn me straight out. ‘I’m a collector, Mrs. Tasker,’ he said. ‘Pots and pans there’ll be in my room a-plenty. And if it’s extra trouble for you to dust we’ll come to an understanding.’ And another thing he said: ‘I’ll come and go as I like.’ And so he did. ‘Expect me when you see me.’ That was the rule. Last year he was in Italy, at his house in Florence. The address is on his card. You can see it for yourself. Three months he was away, and one morning back he came, without a word, with a carpet-bag full of flower-pots.”

“How—” persevered Sergeant Plumptree.

“And then this February he goes away again. The twelfth of February. I’ve marked it in the rent-book—see, Friday the twelfth of February. I’m going down to Kent, he said. I didn’t catch the name. Stanton, I thought he said. It may have been Stancomb.”

“I thought—” said Sergeant Plumptree.

“I know what you’re going to say,” said Mrs. Tasker. “But wait. He went away on the Friday. I’m going down to Kent, he said. And if I find what I’m looking for, that’ll be the beginning of great things, Mrs. Tasker. Great things. I’ll be back tonight, he said.”

“And he never came back?”

“Certainly he did. That night, as he said. Then the next day he went out again. No luggage. Nothing. That was always his way. ‘Ah,’ I thought. ‘He’ll be off to Italy. He’s found what he’s looking for.’ And when one week went by and then another, I knew I was right.”

“You knew he—?”

“I knew he was in Italy, where he is now,” concluded Mrs. Tasker triumphantly. “Enjoying the hot weather.”

With a discretion beyond his years Sergeant Plumptree refrained from any comment on this interesting speculation.

III

“It’s the question of access which is worrying me,” said Hazlerigg, “and that’s the sort of thing where you can help.”

“Access to what?” asked Bohun.

“Access to that deed box in which we found the body,” said Hazlerigg. He added as an afterthought: “Access to this room, access to the office building, access to Lincoln’s Inn.”

“Well,” said Bohun. “Anyone can get into any of the public parts of Lincoln’s Inn at any time by day. If you came in very late or very early—or on Saturday afternoon or Sunday—then you’d probably be noticed.”

“Particularly if you were a prominent resident like Abel Horniman.”

“Yes. The porters certainly knew him by sight. At any time during office hours you can get into the Inn by at least six routes and there’s no check of any sort.”

“Right,” said Hazlerigg. “Now the office.”

“That’s more difficult,” said Bohun. “I haven’t been here long, and perhaps this week hasn’t been exactly a typical one, but I really have been surprised at the number of people who wander through these offices without question. Not only the staff, but outsiders, too. On our side of the office we’ve got the reception-room—where the junior typists sit. All visitors to the office are supposed to look in there first—clients, messengers, clerks from other offices, people examining deeds, people selling office accessories, and even the friends and relatives of the staff. The other side is a bit more select. There are only these three partners’ offices and the partners’ secretaries’ room. But even so, a lot of people who know the ropes short-circuit the system by going straight in to see the secretary of the partner they’re interested in—or to bring messages—or collect mail—or wind up the clocks, or spray the telephones or clean the typewriters.”

“In short,” said Hazlerigg, “anyone who looked as if they had some business to transact could walk into either side of the office during business hours whenever they liked without anyone stopping them, and probably without anyone noticing them. After business hours no one could get into the Inn without a strong probability of being noticed—or into the offices?”

“Certainly not into the offices,” said Bohun. “Sergeant Cockerill locks the two doors at night. He leaves about seven. He’s the last to go.”

“Who has keys?”

“No one has keys except him, I understand. If he’s away he hands them over to someone else. He’s the locker-upper in chief. He looks after the strong-room as well.”

“Supposing one of the partners wanted to get in after hours?”

“I’m not sure,” said Bohun. “I asked John Cove and he said that no partner in a fashionable firm of solicitors ever did work after hours—that sort of thing being left, one gathers, to the shirt-sleeves brigade in the City. If a partner wanted to work late I suppose he would get the door keys from Sergeant Cockerill and do the locking up himself.”

“Even Abel Horniman didn’t have the keys?”

“Not of the outer doors.”

“I see,” said Hazlerigg. “Well, that would seem to dispose of that. Not forgetting that any key can be copied—these big heavy door-keys easier than most. Now what about Horniman’s room.”

“In office hours,” said Bohun slowly, “there is one very serious obstacle. If you look at the lay-out you’ll see that the partners’ secretaries’ room is really designed to control the entrance to all three of the partners’ rooms. And at least one of the three secretaries—Miss Cornel, Miss Chittering or Miss Mildmay—had always to be in it.”

“You say they have to be in it,” said the inspector doubtfully. “How well was the rule observed?”

“Pretty well, I imagine,” said Bohun. “First of all, this was a Horniman office and system’s the watchword. But apart from that, the partners’ telephone exchange was in the secretaries’ room. It was all part of the system for keeping irritating or unwanted clients at arm’s length—which is a fairly important thing in any solicitor’s office. The actual telephone exchange—the one that connects up with the outside world—is in the basement and is looked after by Sergeant Cockerill or his young stand-in, Charlie. When a call comes for one of the partners it is plugged through first to the partners’ secretaries’ room and vetted there before being put through to the partner concerned. It really does mean that one of the secretaries has to be there the whole time.”

“I see,” said the inspector. “And they’d have noticed at once if Mr. Smallbone had gone into Mr. Horniman’s office?…”

“Not only would they have noticed it,” said Bohun, with a smile, “but they’d have made a note of it in the journal, and, when Smallbone finally left, the secretary concerned—Miss Cornel in this case—would have noted the length of time he’d been there—with a view to typing out an ‘attendance’ on the subject later. How do you think we poor solicitors live?”

Hazlerigg thought about all this for some time, but made no comment. Finally, he said: “Well, then—that box.”

“That’s more difficult still,” said Bohun. “You can see that it’s a good lock—a five-lever—more like a strong box than a deed box. It can be forced, as Sergeant Cockerill demonstrated—but it wouldn’t be easy to pick, I should think—not without leaving traces.”

“Right,” said Hazlerigg. “And the keys.”

“The boxes were in sets. Each partner’s room had a set. There was a master-key for each set, with a ‘single variant’ key for each box in the set. But no key of one set would fit another set. The partner concerned kept the ring of keys for his boxes, and the master-key, in case he lost an individual key.”

“Wasn’t that rather over-elaborate?”

“You just didn’t know Abel Horniman,” said Bohun.

“It was right up his street. One key—one box—one client. I don’t think the other partners enjoyed the system quite so much. Birley lost all his keys in the course of time and had to have a new set made. Craine, I know, keeps his boxes permanently unlocked. But that doesn’t affect the point at issue, since none of their keys would fit the Ichabod Stokes box, anyway. Only Abel Horniman had that key—and apparently he didn’t have it either. I don’t know what Bob Horniman’s story is—but Miss Cornel says that he couldn’t find either the key for this particular box, or the master. The other seventeen were there all right.”

“Thank you,” said Hazlerigg. “I think I’d better have a word with Bob Horniman.”

Bob could tell him very little about the keys.

“I was father’s sole executor,” he explained. “And I took everything over. There were a lot of keys. House keys as well as office keys. I knew that this bunch belonged to the office, so I brought them here and kept them in my desk drawer. I never realised that one of them was missing. I used the others from time to time to open various boxes—”

“But, of course, you’d never had occasion to go to this particular box until this morning.”

“Well, no, I hadn’t,” said Bob. “As a matter of fact I hadn’t really done much about the Ichabod Stokes Trust at all. It had been on my conscience a bit—but a trust isn’t like a conveyancing or litigation matter that has to be kept marching strictly along—and you know how it is. I was a bit rushed and the least urgent job went to the wall.”

“I quite understand,” said Hazlerigg. “Now, about your father. Can you give me some idea of his routine? When he arrived at the office, and so on. Particularly in the last months of his life.”

Bob looked faintly surprised, but said: “He had to take it quite easily. He was under doctor’s orders for the last six months. I think they’d have been happier if he hadn’t come to office at all, but that was out of the question with Dad. The office was his life, you know. He used to get here at about half-past ten and leave at about half-past four.”

“I suppose that the rest of you arrived earlier than that.”

“Good Lord, yes,” said Bob. “Nine-thirty sharp. Even Mr. Craine was usually behind his desk before ten o’clock.”

“I see. Were you and your father living together?”

“No,” said Bob shortly. “I’ve got a flat.”

“I suppose that your father’s house comes to you under the will. Are you going to live there now?”

Bob looked for a moment as if he was searching for some cause of offence in this question. In the end he said: “No. Certainly not. I couldn’t possibly keep it up. It’s a great barracks of a place in Kensington.”

IV

Sergeant Plumptree would have assented to this description. It wasn’t an attractive house. In colour it was greyish-yellow. In size it was enormous. It was designed on the sound Victorian principle which kept the kitchen in the basement, the family on the ground and the first floor, the guests on the second floor, the servants on the third floor and the children in the attic.

A bearded lady with one stationary and one roving eye opened the door and showed Sergeant Plumptree into a morning-room heavy with black satinwood and maroon chenille. She motioned him to a penitential chair, folded her plump white hands, and awaited in silence whatever indignities her interrogator might see fit to heap upon her.

“Well, ma’am,” said Sergeant Plumptree pleasantly. “It’s a question of times—”

Without too much prompting he obtained the following information. It would have seemed that Abel Horniman was as much a creature of habit in his home as in his office, particularly during the last six months of his life. Everything had been done to render his course smooth. A nurse had always been in attendance. Sergeant Plumptree noted her name and address, feeling glad of a chance of corroborative evidence. Abel Horniman had got up at eight-thirty and had his breakfast at nine-fifteen and had read his Times and his Financial Times until the car came to fetch him at five past ten. In the evenings he had always been home by five o’clock for tea, and had then liked to sit and listen to the wireless before changing into a dinner jacket for his evening meal.

“Did he ever go out at that time?”

The housekeeper looked faintly surprised. “Certainly not,” she said.

“Never,” persisted the sergeant. “I’m sorry. It’s just that we must be certain—”

“Mr. Horniman”—the housekeeper pursed her lips—“was a dying man. He never went out in the evenings.”

“Thank you. And then…”

“After that,” said the housekeeper, “at ten o’clock he retired to bed. The nurse had the bedroom across the passage and I had the room next to her. Between us we were certain to hear if he cried out. His attacks, you know—very sudden.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Sergeant Plumptree.

It seemed to him to be pretty conclusive. There would be just time, he thought, to call on the nurse, before reporting back to Inspector Hazlerigg.

V

Dr. Bland, the pathologist, was a dry man but an enthusiast.

The photograph which he exhibited for Hazlerigg’s attention looked, at first blink, like an aerial view of the Grand Canyon of Arizona. There were the innumerable fissile crevices running in from either side towards the centre, the gulfs and gullies, the potholes and pockmarks of the surrounding terrain; and there down the middle, as if ruled off by a draughtsman, was the deep, steep-sided indenture of the canyon itself, and far down at the bottom the dark line of the stream.

“Effect of picture-wire on the human neck,” said Dr. Bland. “Two hundred magnifications.”

“Extraordinary,” said Hazlerigg with distaste. “I suppose that dark line at the bottom is the—just so. You needn’t explain. What does it all prove?”

“Quite a lot,” said the doctor. “Would you like a picture of the weapon. Subject to very slight possible errors, here it is. Take a short piece of ordinary seven-strand brass picture-wire. Drive a small hole between the strands, about two-thirds of the way along—you could do that with a nail, or a sharp gimlet. Then thread one end of your wire through the hole. That gives you a nice smoothly-running noose, or slip-knot. I suggest that you then fasten toggles of wood—anything to afford you a good grip—one at either end of your wire. There’s an inexpensive, neat, household model of the garrotter’s loop—”

“Inexpensive,” said Hazlerigg. “Neat, and untraceable.”

“Oh, quite,” said the pathologist. “It’s a household weapon. Anybody could make one.”

“Thank you.”

“I haven’t done yet,” said Dr. Bland. “That’s a picture of the weapon. Would you like a picture of your murderer?”

“If it’s not asking too much of you,” said Hazlerigg politely.

“Well, to a certain extent the weapon implies the user. He must be methodical, neat with his hands, with enough imagination to devise such a weapon, and enough ruthlessness to use it.”

“You surprise me,” said Hazlerigg.

“He is also, most probably, left-handed.”

“What!”

“Ah—I thought that might stir you out of your confounded dismal professional indifference,” said the pathologist. “That’s a clue, isn’t it? That’s something to go on. Not just one of Jimmy Bland’s pawky generalisations. I repeat, he was left-handed. I mean it in this sense—not that he was a man who only used his left hand, but he was a man whose left hand—or, at all events, his left wrist was better developed and stronger than his right.”

“Where did you get all this from?”

“From the wire. From the enlarged photograph of the neck, which you so rudely threw back at me a moment ago.” Dr. Bland laid the photograph on the table again and ran the tip of his finger along some of the north-bank tributaries of the Colorado. “Observe,” he said, “how all the creases on the right are drawn backwards—that is, towards the spine. That means that when the murderer started to pull, he held the right handle of his machine steady, and excited the actual pressure with his left hand. No other explanation will fit. Now for an ordinary, right-handed man, the tendency would have been just the opposite. He would have held steady with the left hand and done the pulling with the right. Cast your mind back to the last time you pulled a tight cork out of a bottle of old port—”

“Yes, I think I see what you mean.”

Hazlerigg went through the motions of garrotting an imaginary victim, whilst the pathologist watched and nodded his approval.

“One other thing, doctor. You say ‘he’ and ‘him’ and ‘the man’. Is that certain? Could it have been a woman?”

“Certainly. A man or a woman. Using this little weapon all you need is the initial surprise, and a certain amount of luck. Consider now. I am going to strangle you.” He pushed the inspector into the late Abel Horniman’s office chair. “You have no cause to suspect me. Right? I am standing quietly behind you. I put my hands round your throat. What do you do? Ah—as I thought. You put your own hands up and try to tear away my fingers. You find it difficult because, strong as you are, you’re sitting down, your knees are under the desk, and you can’t use your weight. But not impossibly difficult. You catch one of my little fingers and bend—all right—all right—you needn’t be too realistic. You manage to break my grip. If you are a man and I am a woman you’d probably break out quite easily. But consider the murderer who is using a wire loop. It’s strong, and it’s as sharp as a cheese-cutter, and it’s an inch into your neck before you know what’s happening. You can’t shout. You’re half paralysed with the shock of the attack and there’s nothing to catch hold of. That’s the crux of it. You can’t get so much as the tip of a finger between the wire and your neck. Yes, yes. I think a woman could kill a man with a weapon like that.”

VI

Hazlerigg had a word with Bohun before he left the office that evening.

He summed things up, principally for his own comfort and edification.

“Abel Horniman is out,” he said. “That’s a pity, because he was our number one candidate. He was the man who ought to have committed this murder. He was the man who might have had every reason for removing Smallbone. But he didn’t do it.”

He paused for a moment; then went on: “I don’t say that we could get up in court and prove that it was impossible for him to have done it. It’s difficult to prove a negative. I suppose he might have crept out of bed in the middle of the night and made his way to Lincoln’s Inn. He might have got in without attracting attention, let himself into the office and killed Smallbone, though I can’t imagine how he’d have got him there unnoticed. It’s theoretically possible. But so improbable that I intend to disregard it. It’s my experience that in real life criminals tend to do their jobs the easiest way. Not the most difficult or the most picturesque. They don’t haul the corpses to the top of Nelson’s Column or exhibit them in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. Not unless they are mad.”

As Hazlerigg said this he contemplated for a moment the uncomfortable spectre which must haunt all policemen. He thought of Chief Inspector Aspinall and Inspector Hervey scouring the Midlands for a man who specialised in the murder of six-year-old girls. A man who might be a clerk or a labourer. A lay preacher or a lawyer or a Lord Mayor. A kindly father, an indulgent elder brother, a rational man for twenty-nine days out of thirty. And on the thirtieth—a creature, in the hunting of whom there was no logic and in the hanging of whom no satisfaction.

He shook his head angrily. “I’ll believe in a madman if I have to,” he said. “Not till then. Good night.”

“Good night,” said Bohun.

He walked home across the darkening square, his mind astir with alarming fancies.