XXXIII. Evidence of What Should Have Happened

CHAPTER XXXIII

EVIDENCE OF WHAT SHOULD

HAVE HAPPENED

“Now see you how. this dragon egg of ours

Swells with its ripening plot?’

Death’s Jest-Book

WEDNESDAY, 8 JULY

‘TURNING MY HAIR GREY, THAT’S what it is,’ said Inspector Umpelty.

“Not a book, not a scrap of paper, not as much as a line on the blotting pad. …

‘No, not even a bottle of purple ink. …

‘He’s an artful one if you like. Always posted his own letters, or so the girl says. …

‘Yes, I know, it’s all very well saying he must have been up to mischief —the job is to prove it. You know what juries are. …

‘Weldon’s the fool of the two, but he’s not talking. And we shan’t find anything at his place—Morecambe never trusted him with anything. …

‘No; we haven’t traced his friend in Warsaw—not yet. …

‘Oh, I know; but meantime we’ve got to charge them with something that looks like something. And do it quick. There’s such a thing as Habeas Corpus. …

‘It’s absolutely positive that neither of them could have been at the Flat-Iron cutting throats, nor yet the lady. And it’s a bit awkward to fetch up three people and charge ’em with being accomplices to a murder which you can’t even prove is a murder. …

‘Thank you, my lord, I don’t mind if I do.’

‘I freely admit,’ said Wimsey, ‘that it’s the queerest case I ever struck. We’ve got all the evidence—at least, not all, but overwhelming evidence— of an elaborate conspiracy to do something or the other, And we’ve got a corpse which looks like the victim of a conspiracy to murder. But when we come to put the two together, they don’t fit. Everything in the garden is lovely except the melancholy fact that none of the people engaged in the conspiracy could possibly have done the murder. Harriet! It’s your business to work out problems of this sort—how do you propose to tackle this one?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Harriet. ‘I can only suggest a few methods and precedents. There’s the Roger Sheringham method, for instance. You prove elaborately and in detail that A did the murder; then you give the story one final shake, twist it round a fresh corner, and find that the real murderer is B —the person you suspected first and then lost sight of.’

‘That’s no good; the cases aren’t parallel. We can’t even plausibly fix anything on A, let alone B.’

‘No; well, there’s the Philo Vance method. You shake your head and say: “There’s worse yet to come,” and then the murderer kills five more people, and that thins the suspects out a bit and you spot who it is.’

‘Wasteful, wasteful,’ said Wimsey. ‘And too slow.’

‘True. There’s the Inspector French method—you break the unbreakable alibi.’

Wimsey groaned.

‘If anybody says “Alibi” to me again, I’ll—I’ll—’

‘All right. There are plenty of methods left. There’s the Thorndyke type of solution, which, as Thorndyke himself says, can be put in a nut-shell. “You have got the wrong man, you have got the wrong box, and you have got the wrong body.” Suppose, for instance, that Paul Alexis is really—’

‘The Emperor of Japan! Thank you.’

‘Well, that might not be so far off. He thought he was an Emperor, or next door to it, anyhow. Though even if he had fifty kinds of Imperial blood in his veins instead of only two or three, it wouldn’t help us to explain how he managed to get killed with nobody near him. The real difficulty—’

‘Wait a moment,’ said Wimsey. ‘Say that again.’

Harriet said it again. ‘The real difficulty,’ she persisted, ‘is that one can’t see how anybody—let alone Morecambe or Henry Weldon—could have done the murder. Even if Pollock—’

‘The real difficulty,’ interrupted Wimsey, in a suddenly high-pitched and excited voice, ‘is the time of the death, isn’t it?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose it is.’

‘Of course it is. If it wasn’t for that, we could explain everything.’ He laughed, ‘You know, I always thought it was funny, if Henry Weldon did the murder, that he shouldn’t seem to know what time he did it at. Look! Let’s pretend we’ve planned this murder ourselves and have timed it for twelve o’clock, shall we?’

‘What’s the good of that? We know it wasn’t actually done till two o’clock. You can’t get round that, my lord.’

‘Ah! but I want to look at the original murder as it was planned. It’s true that the murderers later on found themselves faced with an unexpected alteration in the time-scheme, but just for the moment we’ll work out the time-scheme as it originally stood. Do you mind? I want to.’

The Inspector grunted, and Wimsey sat for a few minutes, apparently thinking hard. Then he spoke, without any trace of his former excitement.

‘It’s February,’ he said. You’re Henry Weldon. You have just heard that your elderly and foolish mother is going to marry a dancing dago thirty-five years younger than herself, and disinherit you. You are badly in need of money and you want to stop this at all costs. You make yourself unpleasant, but you find it’s no good: you’ll only lose all the money instead of only part. You are not an inventive man yourself, but you consult—yes, why do you consult Morecambe, Inspector?’

‘Well, my lord, it seems that when Weldon came down here to see his mother, he picked up with Mrs Morecambe somewhere or other. He’s a great man with the ladies, and she probably thought there was money to be made out of him, seeing his mother was a rich woman. He pretty soon put her right about that, I fancy, and she got the idea of bringing her husband in on the job. That’s all speculative, as you might say, though we’ve checked up that Mrs M. was staying at Heathbury about the time Weldon was in Wilvercombe. Anyhow, we have made sure of one thing, and that is that Morecambe’s “Commission Agency” is a pretty vague sort of affair and uncommonly rocky on its pins. Our idea was that the lady brought the two men together, and that Morecambe promised to do what he could for Weldon on a fifty-fifty basis.’

‘Fifty-fifty of what?’ asked Harriet.

‘Of his mother’s money—when he raked it in.’

“But that wouldn’t be till she died.’

‘No, miss, it wouldn’t.’

‘Oh—do you think—?’

‘I think those two might have been in it for what they could get out of it, miss,’ said the Inspector, stolidly.

‘I agree,’ said Wimsey, ‘Anyway, the next thing that happens is that Mr Morecambe goes to Leamhurst and stays a few days with Weldon. All through this business, Morecambe has been far too smart to put anything on paper, except all that rubbish in cipher, so I imagine the plot was more or less worked out then. Weldon mentions to Morecambe the romantic tale of Alexis’ Imperial descent, and that gives them the idea for luring their victim to the Flat-Iron. Immediately after this, the mysterious letters begin to go out. I wonder, by the way, what was the excuse for not writing that first letter in Russian. Because, of course, that must have gone out in clear and not in code.’

‘I’ve got an idea about that,’ said Harriet. ‘Didn’t you say you knew of an English novel that had an explanation of the Playfair cipher?”

‘Yes—one of John Rhode’s. Why?’

‘I suggest that the first letter merely gave the title of the book and the chapters concerned and added the code-word for the next message. Since the book was English it would be quite natural to make the whole message English.’

‘Ingenious beast,’ said Wimsey. ‘Meaning you. But it’s quite a possible explanation. We needn’t go into all that story again. Obviously, Mrs Morecambe was the source of information about the topography and fauna of Wilvercombe and Darley. Weldon was chosen to do the throat-cutting and horse-riding part of it, which needed brawn only, while Morecambe buzzed about despatching letters and photographs and working Alexis up to the top-notch of excitement. Then, when everything is about ready, Morecambe goes off to take up his rôle of travelling hairdresser.’

‘But why all that incredible elaboration?’ demanded Harriet. ‘Why didn’t they just buy an ordinary razor or knife in an ordinary way? Surely it would be less traceable.’

‘You’d think so. In fact, I daresay it might have been. But it’s surprising how things do get traced. Look at Patrick Mahon and the chopper, for instance. The plan was to make the thing really impregnable by double and triple lines of defence. First, it was to look like suicide; secondly, if that was questioned and the razor traced, there was to be a convincing origin for the razor; thirdly, if by any chance Morecambe’s disguise was seen through, there was to be an explanation for that.’

‘I see. Well, go on. Morecambe had the courage of his own convictions, anyhow—he did the thing very thoroughly.’

‘Wise man. I admit that he took me in absolutely. Well, now—Weldon. He had his character of Haviland Martin all ready to slip into. Acting under instructions, he hired a Morgan, crammed it uncomfortably with a small tent and his personal belongings, and went to camp at Darley, next door to Farmer Newcombe’s field. Morecambe arrived at Wilvercombe the same day. Whether and when those two met I don’t know. It’s my impression that the whole thing was scheduled beforehand as far as possible, and that there was next to no communication after the plot had once got going.’

‘Very likely,’ said Umpelty. ‘That would account for its getting hitched-up over the times.’

‘Possibly. Well, on the Thursday, Alexis starts off for the Flat-Iron according to instructions. By the way, it was necessary that the body should be found and recognised—hence, I fancy, the fact that Alexis was told to go openly to the rock by the coast-road. In case the body got lost, there would be witnesses to say that he had been last seen going in that direction, and to suggest a possible area for search. It would never have done for him simply to disappear like snow upon the desert’s dusty face.

‘So Alexis goes off to look for a crown. Meanwhile, Henry Weldon has run a needle through the H.T. leads of the Morgan, so as to provide a very good reason for asking for a lift into Wilvercombe. And now you see why a Morgan. It had to be something with only two cylinders, if the whole ignition was to be put out of action with one needle: that is, a Morgan, a Belsize-Bradshaw or a motor-bike. He probably avoided the bike on the ground of exposure to weather, and chose the Morgan as the next most handy and numerous two-cylinder bus.’

Inspector Umpelty smacked his thigh, and then, remembering that none of all this did away with the central snag in the case, blew his nose mournfully.

‘Shortly after ten o’clock, along comes Mrs Morecambe in the Bentley with the conspicuous number-plate. That number-plate was pure chance for them—they can scarcely have picked or wangled it on purpose, but it came in very convenient as a means of identifying the bus. What more natural than that Weldon, if questioned, should remember a number so screamingly funny as that? Oi, oi, oi! Highly humorous, wasn’t it, Inspector?’

‘Where did she put him down, then?’ asked Umpelty, scowling.

‘Anywhere, out of sight of the village and the passing throng. At some point where he can cut across the fields to the shore again. The road turns in rawer sharply from the coast between Darley and Wilvercombe, which doubtless accounts for their having left him so much time for his walk back. In any case, by, say, 11.15, he has walked back to Darley and is cocking an eye over the fence at Farmer Newcombe’s bay mare. He pulls a stake out of the hedge and goes into the field, with oats in one hand and a rope-bridle in the other.’

‘What did he want to take oats for? Surely the horse would have come up to him if he just said “Coop” or whatever it is and shaken his hat about? It seems silly of him to scatter oats all over the place like that’

‘Yes, my child,’ said Wimsey. “But there was a reason for that. I think the oats he scattered were from the day before, when he first started to make friends with the mare. Teach an animal to come for food once and it’ll come twice as fast the second time; but once disappoint it, and it won’t come at all.’

‘Yes, of course. You’re quite right’

‘Now,’ said Wimsey, ‘I think, I can’t prove it, but I think, our hero left most of his clothes behind him. I’m not certain, but it seems an obvious precaution. At any rate, he bridled the mare and mounted her and rode off. You’ve got to remember that between Darley and Pollock’s cottage the shore is hidden from the road, so that the only risk he ran of being seen was by somebody straying on the edge of the cliff itself. And they would probably not worry much about a man exercising a horse along the shore. His real awkward moment was the passing of the cottages, but he had carefully chosen the very time when the working-classes have their dinner. I fancy he went past there just before midday.’

‘They heard hoofs about that time.’

‘Yes. And a little later, Paul Alexis heard them too, as he sat on his rock and dreamed of the Imperial Purple. He looked and saw the Rider from the Sea.’

‘Quite so,’ said Umpelty, unmoved. ‘And what then?’

‘Ah!—you recollect that we are merely describing an ideal crime, in which everything works out as planned.’

‘Oh, yes—of course.’

‘Then—in the ideal crime—Weldon rides up to the rock through the water—and by the way, you will bear in mind that it is fully an hour before low tide and that there is a foot and a half of water at the foot of the Flat-Iron. He ties the mare close by the head to the ring-bolt put there the day before, and he climbs up on to the rock. Alexis may or may not have recognised him. If he did …’

Wimsey paused, and his eyes grew angry.

‘Whether he did or not, he hadn’t much time for disappointment. Weldon asked him to sit down, I think; emperors sit, while respectful commoners stand behind them, you see. Weldon asked for the letter, and Alexis gave him the decoded translation. Then he leaned over him from behind with the razor. …

‘Weldon, of course, was a fool. He did everything wrong that he could do. He ought to have removed those gloves, and he ought to have seen to it that he had the original letter. Perhaps he ought to have searched the body. But I think that would have been worse still. It might have destroyed the suicidal appearance. Once move a body and you never can recapture the first, fine, careless rapture, don’t you know. And besides, the mare was struggling and nearly breaking away. That would have been fatal. …

‘Do you know, I rather take my hat off to Weldon about this. Ever seen a horse that has suddenly had fresh blood splashed all over it? Not pretty. Definitely not. Cavalry horses have to get used to it, of course—but the bay mare could never have smelt blood before. When I realise that Weldon had to mount that squealing, plunging, terrified brute bareback from the top of a rock, and ride her away without letting her once plunge on to the sand, I tell you, I takeoff my hat.’

‘You mean, you would have had to, if it had happened that that way.’

‘Exactly. A man who could seriously contemplate bringing that scheme off knew something about horses. He may even have known too much. I mean … there are ways and ways of subduing violent animals, and some ways are crueller than others. …

‘We’ll suppose he did it. That he somehow got the mare untied from the rock and forced her straight out to sea. That would be the best way. That would tire her out, and at the same time wash the blood away. Then, having got control of her, he rides back as he came. But she has loosened a shoe in her frantic plunging and kicking, and on the way back she wrenches it off altogether. Probably he doesn’t notice that. He rides on past his camp to wherever he left his clothes, looses the mare, gets dressed and hurries out to flag the Bentley on the return journey. I don’t suppose he gets there much before, say 12.55. He’s picked up and set down at the Feathers at one o’clock. Here we leave romance and come back to the facts. Then, after lunch, he goes down to his own place, burns the rope-bridle, which is bloody, and kicks out our friend Perkins, who seems disposed to take too much interest in the rope.’

‘He hadn’t the rope with him at the Feathers, had he?’

‘No; I expect he threw it down in some handy spot on his way back from the Flat-Iron—somewhere near the stream, I should imagine. Well, all he has to do after that is to get Polwhistle to come along and deal with the Morgan. He made another mistake there, of course. When he was putting those leads in his pocket he should have put them in his pocket and seen that they stayed put.

‘But you see that he, too, was intended to have three lines of defence. First, of course, the death was to look like suicide; secondly, the camper at Darley Halt was to be Mr Martin of Cambridge, having no connection with anybody; and thirdly, if Mr Martin was proved to be Henry Weldon, there was the alibi in Wilvercombe, with all the details about Bach and shirt-collars, and an absolutely independent witness in a Bentley car to swear to the story.’

‘Yes, but—’ said Umpelty.

‘I know, I know—bear with me. I know the plan went all wrong, but I want you to realise what it was meant to be. Suppose all this had worked properly—what would have happened? The body would have been left on the rock at about noon, with the razor lying below it. By 12.30, the murderer was well away, nearly at Darley. By one o’clock, he was at the Feathers, eating and drinking, with a witness to swear that he had spent the whole morning in Wilvercombe. If the body was found before the tide turned, there would be no footprints, other than those of the corpse, and suicide would probably be presumed without a second thought—especially when the razor turned up. If the body was not found till later, the footprints would be less important, but the medical evidence would probably establish the time of death, and then the alibi would come in.

‘It sounds a very risky plan, but it sounds riskier than it was. Its boldness was its strength. From the Flat-Iron and for a mile or more before you come to it, the coast-road is visible from the shore. He could keep an eye on it and bide his time. If it looked dangerous, he could put it off to a more convenient season. Actually, the only real risk he ran was of being seen at the very moment of the murder and chased by car along the coast. Otherwise, even if it turned out later that a horseman had been seen on the shore about noon, who could prove who the horseman was? It could certainly not be Mr Haviland Martin, who had no connection with anybody and had spent the morning musically in Wilvercombe. And in any case, how many people did pass along that road? What were the odds that the body would be discovered under a few hours? Or that the death would be supposed to be anything except suicide?’

‘What are the odds now that it wasn’t suicide?’ said Inspector Umpelty. ‘By your own showing it can’t have been anything else. But I see what you mean, my lord. You mean that all this plan was made out, and then, when Weldon got along to the Flat-Iron, something made him change his mind. How’s this? When Alexis sees his Rider from the Sea, he recognises Weldon and asks him to explain, Weldon tells him how they’ve made a fool of him and somehow gets him to promise to chuck Mrs Weldon. Maybe he threatens him with the razor. Then Weldon goes away and Alexis is so disappointed that, after thinking it over a bit, he cuts his throat.’

Weldon having thoughtfully armed him with the razor for that purpose?’

‘Well, yes—I suppose so.’

‘And what did the bay mare see?’ asked Harriet.

‘Ghosts,’ replied Inspector Umpelty, with a snort of incredulity. ‘Anyhow, you can’t put horses in the witness-box.’

‘Weldon made a mistake afterwards in coming to Wilvercombe,’ went on Wimsey. ‘With that identification mark on his arm, he should have kept away, mother or no mother. But he had to poke his nose in and see what was happening, and Morecambe—well, his possible appearance as a witness was foreseen, of course. I wonder, though, if he was really wise to answer that advertisement of ours. I suppose it was the best thing he could do—but he ought to have smelt the trap, I think. But my private impression is that he wanted to keep an eye on Weldon, who was blundering about all over the place.’

‘Excuse me, my lord,’ said Inspector Umpelty, “but we’ve wasted a good hour now speculating about what these people might have done or meant to do. That’s very interesting to you, no doubt, but meanwhile we’re no nearer to knowing what they did do, and here’s three people in prison for doing something they can’t have done. If Alexis cut his own throat, we’ve either got to release these people with apologies, or get up a case against them for conspiring to procure by menaces or something. If some accomplice of theirs killed him, we’ve got to find that accomplice. In either case, I mustn’t waste any more time about it. I only wish I’d never touched the bleeding case.’

‘But you’re so hasty, Inspector,’ bleated Wimsey. ‘I only said the plan went wrong; I never said they didn’t carry it out.’

Inspector Umpelty looked sadly at Wimsey, and his lips silently formed the word ‘loopy’. But aloud he merely observed:

‘Well, my lord, whatever they did, they didn’t murder Alexis at two o’clock, because they weren’t there to do it; and they didn’t murder him at twelve o’clock, because he didn’t the till two. Those are facts, aren’t they?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘You mean, one or other of them was there at two o’clock?’

‘No.’

‘You mean, they did murder Alexis at twelve o’clock?’

‘Yes.’

‘By cutting his throat?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right through?’

‘Right through.’

‘Then how is it he didn’t die till two o’clock?’

‘We have no evidence at all,’ said Wimsey, ‘as to the time Alexis died.’