Smallbone Deceased

‌Chapter Sixteen —Later— The Bill of Costs Is Presented

“E. and O.E.”

I

The Crown, on the advice of its Law Officers, preferred only one charge against Miss Cornel; the murder of Marcus Smallbone. To this charge, despite the strongest persuasion of her advisers, Miss Cornel pleaded guilty. After a formal hearing, therefore, Mr. Justice Arbuthnot pronounced the sentence of death. It was then represented to the Home Secretary that although the available evidence as to the prisoner’s state of mind—her fanatical attachment to her late employer and the lack of any motive of personal gain in her crime—were not sufficient to support a plea of unbalance of mind, they might properly be considered in relation to the Crown’s prerogative of mercy. The Home Secretary, after due consideration, commuted the sentence to one of penal servitude for life.

On the day that he announced his decision, three conversations of interest took place.

II

“Did you ever think that Sergeant Cockerill might have done those murders?” asked Bohun.

“Originally, he was fairly high up on my list,” admitted Inspector Hazlerigg. “Why?”

“It’s academic now, of course. But he had a motive—much the same sort of motive as Miss Cornel had, actually. You knew he used to be Abel’s batman.”

“Yes. We’d dug down as far as that.”

“Did you know he was left-handed?”

“I most certainly did not,” said Hazlerigg, considerably startled. “Are you sure?”

“Perhaps left-handed is rather a strong way of putting it. I mean that he’s a man who does a two-handed job by holding the object in his right hand and making the movements with his left. A right-handed man usually does it the other way about.”

“When did you notice this?”

“I noticed it,” said Bohun, “when he came into my room on the Tuesday or the Wednesday—it was almost my first day in the office—and started mending a chair for me.”

“I see.”

“Then again, he had plenty of very good opportunities.”

“Quite so. Might I ask when you decided that he was not a murderer?”

“When I heard him sing,” said Bohun. “The fellow’s an artist. No one who sings Bach like that could kill a man with a piece of picture-wire. That’s a commercial, utilitarian way of killing. An artist would have too much respect for the beauty of the human neck. He might shoot a man in a fine frenzy, or stab him with a stiletto, or—you’re laughing at me.”

“Don’t stop,” said Hazlerigg. “It’s a pleasure to listen to you. You know, you’d get on famously with our modern school. Pickup is always lecturing me on their theories. They think that all detection should be a combination of analysis and hypnosis.”

“It’s all very well for you to laugh,” said Bohun crossly, “but if you think it’s nonsense, what were you doing at that concert? I saw you.”

“If you really want to know,” said Hazlerigg, “I was doing something which might have been done a good deal sooner. I was finding out how Sergeant Cockerill spent his Saturday mornings.”

“How he spent—”

“Yes. Did it never seem to you to be rather an odd arrangement that he should appear at the office for a few minutes at half-past nine or ten, then disappear for two or three hours, and turn up again at twelve-thirty. How did you suppose he spent the middle of the morning?”

“I don’t think I ever really gave it a thought,” said Bohun. “But I can see you’re longing to tell me. What did he do?”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” said Hazlerigg, “he used to rehearse. But I found there was a little more to it than that. One of his neighbours, who was also in the choir, used to give him a lift in his car, and wait for him afterwards and take him home. A Colonel Lincoln. A very respectable man and an unimpeachable witness. He used to park his car in New Square whilst Cockerill locked up. He says Cockerill never kept him waiting more than two minutes.”

“That sounds pretty conclusive,” agreed Bohun.

“I was fairly certain, even before that,” said Hazlerigg. “That was only corroboration. As I frequently said, the sheet anchor of my faith all along was the conviction that the same person must have done both killings. Now I agree that on the face of it Cockerill could quite easily have killed Smallbone. But he could never have killed Miss Chittering.”

“Well, do you know, it just occurred to me to wonder,” said Bohun. “It’s true that Mason, the porter, was with him when he was approaching the building—”

“I know what you’re going to say. It occurred to me, too. You thought that Cockerill might have gone inside and quietly noosed Miss Chittering during the time that Mason was fooling around with that pigeon. I timed it the next night. He would have had about four minutes. I suppose it was barely possible—feasible, I mean, in a detective story sense. But apart from the improbability of it, there was one factor which I think ruled it out of court. I went along with Mason the next night to check up and he was quite emphatic about it. All the office lights were out. There’s a fanlight over the secretaries’ room and you can see at once if that light’s on. According to Mason it wasn’t. The reason for that’s plain enough, of course. When Miss Cornel had finished with Miss Chittering she turned the lights out and pulled the door shut—she didn’t want the body to be discovered at once. It would have made everybody’s alibis far more confusing, in fact, if the discovery could have been delayed until the next morning.”

“Yes. By the way, how did she get back into the building without being seen by anybody?”

“I don’t suppose she ever left the building. She probably sat, in the dark, on the next flight of stairs and waited till the coast was clear.”

“What a ruthless woman,” said Bohun. “And, incidentally, what a nerve.”

“A strong left wrist isn’t the only thing you develop in a Women’s Golf Championship,” said Hazlerigg.

III

“Darling,” said Anne Mildmay. “You remember that awful night.”

“Which awful night?” said Bob, looking up from what he was doing. “Oh, at Sevenoaks—yes.”

“Do you think I was drugged?”

“I don’t know,” said Bob. “You had a very advanced hangover the next morning.”

“But what would have been the point of it?”

“If you ask me,” said Bob, “it wasn’t drugs at all. It was two glasses of neat whisky coupled with the excitement.”

“And what was I supposed to be excited about?” demanded Anne coldly.

“The prospect of marrying a farmer,” said Bob.

Silence fell again on the little room, with its French window which opened on to an uncut lawn running down to a quiet river under a silver September sky.

“The joke of it is,” said Bob, “that I took up farming to get away from office work.” He wiped the ink off his finger on to one of the tassels of the tablecloth.

“Never mind,” said Anne. “Get on and finish that ‘Milk Marketing—Cows in Calf—Feeding Stuffs—1950–51—Estimated quantities’, and I’ll take it down to the post after tea.”

IV

That same afternoon, Bohun, back in the office, was drinking his tea (as a partner he now had it brought to him in a cup with a saucer) and watching Mr. Craine. No one, he reflected, would have thought that the cheerful little man had just completed a very trying six months. His reserves of vitality were amazing. He had paid off the Husbandmen and dealt firmly with their scruples about suppressing the details of Abel’s most irregular mortgage. He had used the balance of Bohun’s money judiciously to strengthen the finances of the firm. He had taken on three new assistants, and had snapped up the services of John Cove, now inexplicably qualified. He had undertaken the whole cost and the endless work involved in Miss Cornel’s defence. He had smoothed down the susceptibilities of innumerable clients. He had engaged a new, even more ravishing and, at the moment, inexperienced secretary. She was learning quickly.

“If Miss Cornel was mad,” he was saying, “then I’m mad, and you’re mad. We’re all of us mad.”

Bohun nodded.

“I’m glad she didn’t hang, though,” he said. “After she’d killed Smallbone—and the real reason, the inner reason for that I don’t suppose we shall ever know—everything else was self-defence. The killing of Miss Chittering and the efforts to throw the blame on to Bob. She was fighting for her life.”

“Do you know,” said Mr. Craine. “I’m not sure that even now I quite understand about that rucksack. And who was the little man from the Left Luggage Office that Hazlerigg was going to subpœna?”

“I think,” said Bohun, “that that was the most truly remarkable thing about the whole business. The single thin, unbreakable thread of causation which joined the body of Marcus Smallbone to the Left Luggage Office at London Bridge Station. It turned on such a trivial series of events, and yet it was strong enough to cause the death of at least one innocent person.”

“Strong enough to bring Miss Cornel into the dock,” said Mr. Craine. “It seemed to me to be the only tangible evidence they had. I admit it never came to the test, because she pleaded guilty—but all that stuff about rolling screws and left wrists—Macrea would have made pretty short work of that.”

“I rather agree. Well, here’s how it worked. Miss Cornel decides to kill Smallbone. She decides, for a number of reasons, that the best place to do it is at the office, on a Saturday morning, when she knows she will be alone. Then she must devise a hiding-place where the body may lie hidden for some little time. Eight or ten weeks will be enough. Fortunately, there is such a hiding-place. One of the boxes, so handy, so capacious, so fortunately air-tight. She selects the one least likely to be opened in the course of the day’s work, and steals, or copies, the key. The fact that this box happened to contain the papers of the very trust of which the victim was a trustee was bizarre but coincidental. But it was these papers, you note, which constituted the first real snag. And this was where the Horniman office system signally justified its founder. In no other office—in no other solicitors’ office in London, I think—would the disposal of a bundle of papers and files and account books have caused the murderer any embarrassment. There would have been a dozen places where they could have decently been laid to rest with other papers, out of sight and out of mind, collecting as the months and years went by only a further coating of black dust. In this office they would have been noticed in twenty-four hours—the fat would have been in the fire with a vengeance. Therefore they had to be disposed of out of the office.”

“Well, that oughtn’t to have been too difficult,” said Mr. Craine. “She could have—let me see, now—dropped them into the Thames.”

“In broad daylight?”

“Or taken them home and burnt them in her garden.”

“She particularly did not want to arrive at Sevenoaks station—where she was well known and very likely to be noticed—carrying a bulky package. The fact could easily have been remembered.”

“Then she could have—well, you tell me.”

“It wasn’t all that easy,” said Bohun, “and she thought it out very carefully. On the Saturday morning in question, on the way to the office, she stopped and purchased a large green rucksack. She had it wrapped up, as a parcel, at the shop—explaining that it was a gift for a friend—and brought it to the office with her. Once Eric Duxford had departed on his private business and she was alone, she took all the papers out of the Stokes box and proceeded to cut out, with her nail scissors, all references in the papers to Horniman, Birley and Craine. It wasn’t too bad, because it was mostly account books and schedules of investments—not letters. I expect she burnt the snippets then and there. The rest of the papers, now comparatively unidentifiable, went into the rucksack. After she had finished with Smallbone and left the office, she carried the rucksack with her—a little luck was necessary not to be seen coming out of the office with it, but Lincoln’s Inn is a very deserted place on Saturday morning. When she got to London Bridge she deposited it in the Left Luggage Office. She knew that unclaimed packages were opened after six months, but she reckoned that even when that happened no one would be smart enough to connect a lot of old papers without any name on them with Horniman, Birley and Craine, and thus with the Lincoln’s Inn murder. Ten to one they would have been sent for pulping without another thought. And further and more important even if the connection was noticed, there was no one to connect her with the rucksack. It was a common type. She had bought it at a large and busy shop and paid cash. And she had been careful that no one who knew her had seen it in her possession.”

He paused.

“It was a bit of bad luck, so shattering that it seems to belong to the realm of reality rather than the realm of Art, that this particular rucksack should have been sold to her by the head of the Camping Department of Messrs. Merryweather and Matlock.”

“Miss Chittering’s fiancé?”

“Yes. He recognised Miss Cornel and remembers that he mentioned the transaction to Miss Chittering later—even described the rucksack.”

“Yes, I see.”

“Imagine Miss Cornel’s feelings when, in the secretaries’ room, in front of almost the whole staff—including myself—Miss Chittering suggested that Miss Cornel should lend Miss Bellbas ‘her big green rucksack’.”

“Good God,” said Mr. Craine. “What did she do?”

“Kept her head. Turned the conversation. But I reckon she knew from that moment what would have to be done—and a week later she did it.”

Bohun finished his tea and rose to go. As he reached the door Mr. Craine surprised him by saying:

“I wonder what she really thought of Abel.”

“I think she was very attached—”

“Yes,” said Mr. Craine. “It’s funny when you come to think of it—the different way people see each other. I don’t mind betting the Husbandmen think of Abel as nothing but a crook. I thought about him—when I thought about him—as a damned good lawyer and a bloody difficult partner. To her I suppose he was a sort of God.”

“No,” said Bohun. “I don’t think he was quite that. She was too level-headed to have terrestrial gods. It was just that she saw all the better side of him. Do you remember that money she used to distribute to those poor old ladies, as almoner for Abel. When you come to reckon it up, that was a most revealing indication of their relationship. The money was entirely in his discretion. He might so easily and safely have stolen that. But he didn’t. He was prepared to swindle a large corporation to the tune of ten thousand pounds but he wouldn’t dip his hand into their shillings and pence. And Miss Cornel knew it. She carried his purse for him. She’d been his right hand and his left hand for nearly twenty years.”

“Of course, he was a widower,” said Mr. Craine thoughtfully. “You don’t think—”

“No,” said Bohun firmly. “I don’t. I think it was one of those relationships which just happens. I don’t suppose either side fully understood it.”

Back in his own room he found Mrs. Porter with the afternoon post. He turned his thoughts resolutely towards the future.

“To the Whizzo Laundry—two z’s, Mrs. Porter—West Street, Wirral. Sir, Our client, Lady Buntingford, instructs us most emphatically that she dispatched three undervests—”