‘It wouldn’t surprise me at all. He was a very stupid young man. He did take a parcel out to the car, but it wasn’t collars. It was ties. I went in twice – once for the ties, and then I remembered the collars and went back; but as they hadn’t got what I wanted, I left them. That would be about half-past twelve, I think, if the time is of any importance.’
The Inspector hesitated. It might – it might just be true. The most honest witness makes a mistake sometimes. He decided to let it go for the moment.
‘And you picked Mr Weldon up at the Old Market again?’
‘Yes. But when you say it was this Mr Weldon, Inspector, you’re putting words into my mouth. I picked up somebody – a man with dark spectacles – but I didn’t know his name till he told me, and I didn’t recognise the man afterwards when I saw him without the spectacles. In fact I thought then, and I still think, that the man I picked up had dark hair. The other man’s voice sounded much the same – but, after all, that isn’t a lot to go upon. I thought it must be he, because he seemed to remember all about it, and knew the number of my car, but of course, if it came to swearing to his identity – well!’ She shrugged her shoulders.
‘Quite so, madam.’ It was clear enough to the Inspector what was happening. Since the discovery of the real time of the murder had made the morning alibi more dangerous than useful, it was being ruthlessly jettisoned. More trouble, he thought sourly, and more checking-up of times and places. He thanked the lady politely for her helpful explanation, and then asked whether he might have a word with Mr Morecambe.
‘With my husband?’ Mrs Morecambe registered surprise. ‘I don’t think he will be able to tell you anything. He was not staying at Heathbury at the time, you know.’
The Inspector admitted that he was aware of the fact, and added, vaguely, that this was a purely formal inquiry. ‘Part of our system,’ he explained, and obscurely connected with the fact that Mr Morecambe was the legal owner of the Bentley.
Mrs Morecambe smiled graciously. Well, Mr Morecambe was at home, as it happened. He had not been very well, lately, but no doubt he would be ready to assist the Inspector if it was really necessary. She would ask him to come down.
Inspector Umpelty indicated that this was not really necessary. He would be happy to accompany Mrs Morecambe to her husband’s room. At which precaution Chief Inspector Parker smiled: any necessary arrangements between the Morecambes would surely have been perfected by this time.
Mrs Morecambe led the way to the door, followed by Mr Umpelty. She glanced round as though expecting Parker to follow, but he kept his seat. After a momentary hesitation, Mrs Morecambe went out, leaving her second guest to his own devices. She went upstairs, with the Inspector padding behind her, murmuring apologies and trying to keep his boots from making a noise.
The room they entered on the first floor was furnished as a study, and beyond it, another door, half-open, led into a bedroom. At a table in the study sat a small, red-bearded man, who turned sharply to face them at their entrance.
‘My dear,’ said Mrs Morecambe, ‘this is Inspector Umpelty of the Wilvercombe police. He wants to know something about the car.’
‘Oh, yes, Inspector, what is it?’ Mr Morecambe spoke genially, but his geniality was as nothing compared to the geniality of the Inspector.
‘Hullo, Bright, my man!’ said he. ‘Risen a bit in the world since I last saw you, haven’t you?’
Mr Morecambe raised his eyebrows, glanced at his wife, and then broke into a hearty laugh.
‘Well done, Inspector!’ said he. ‘What did I tell you, dear? You can’t deceive our fine British police-force. With his usual acumen, the man has spotted me! Well, sit down, Inspector and have a drink, and I’ll tell you all about it.’
Umpelty cautiously lowered his large form into a chair and accepted a whisky-and-soda.
‘First of all, congratulations on your sleuthing,’ said Mr Morecambe, cheerfully. ‘I thought I’d got rid of that fellow in Selfridge’s, but I suppose the other fellow with the quick-change headgear managed to keep on the scent, in spite of my artistic camouflage in the Cinema. Well, now, I suppose you want to know why Alfred Morecambe, commission-agent of London, was going about at Wilvercombe disguised as William Bright, that seedy and unsatisfactory tonsorial artist. I don’t blame you. I daresay it does look queerish. Well, to start with – here’s the explanation.’
He gathered up a number of sheets of paper from his writing-table and pushed them across to Umpelty.
‘I’m writing a play for my wife,’ he said. ‘You have no doubt discovered that she was the famous Tillie Tulliver before she married. I’ve written a play or two before, under the name of Cedric St Denis – spare-time work, you know – and this new one deals with the adventures of an itinerant hairdresser. The best way to pick up local colour is to go and get it personally.’
‘I see, sir.’
‘I ought to have told you all this at the time,’ said Mr Morecambe, with a frank air of apology, ‘but it really didn’t seem necessary. As a matter of fact, I felt it would make me look a bit of a fool in the City. I was supposed to be taking a holiday for my health, you see, and if my partner had known what I was really up to, he might have been a little annoyed. In any case, you had my evidence, which was all that was really necessary – and I must admit that I rather enjoyed playing the ne’er-do-well to all you people. I did it rather well, don’t you think? Thanks to my wife’s coaching, of course.’
‘I see, sir.’ Inspector Umpelty fastened promptly on the salient point of all this. ‘Your account of your meeting with Paul Alexis was a fact, then?’
‘Absolutely true in every particular. Except, of course, that I never really had the slightest intention of committing suicide. As a matter of fact, the idea of passing the night in one of the lodging-houses appropriate to my impersonation didn’t greatly appeal to me at that moment, and I was putting off the evil hour as long as possible. It’s quite true that I made up a hard-luck story for Alexis – though I didn’t actually take any money from the poor fellow. I drew the line at that. The pound-note I paid out that night was my own. But you nearly tied me up over that business about the tide. I rather over-reached myself there with all that picturesque detail.’ He laughed again.
‘Well, well,’ said the Inspector. ‘You’ve led us a fine dance, sir.’ He glanced at the manuscript sheets in his hands, which appeared, so far as he could make out, to substantiate Morecambe’s story. ‘It’s a pity you didn’t take us into your confidence, sir. We could probably have arranged for nothing to come out about it in the press. However – if I take a fresh statement from you now, that will clear that up all right.’
He cocked his head for a moment as though listening, and then went on rapidly:
‘I take it, that statement will just confirm the evidence you gave at the inquest? Nothing to add to it in any way?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘You never, for instance, came across this Mr Henry Weldon at any time?’
‘Weldon?’
‘The man I gave the lift to,’ prompted Mrs Morecambe, ‘whose mother was engaged to the dead man.’
‘Oh, him? Never saw him in my life. Don’t suppose I’d recognise him now if I saw him. He didn’t give evidence, did he?’
‘No, sir. Very good, then. If you like, I will take a statement from you now. I’ll just call in my colleague, if you don’t mind, to witness it.’
The Inspector threw open the door. Chief Inspector Parker must have been waiting on the landing, for he marched in at once, followed by a respectable-looking working-woman and a large, stout man smoking a cigar. The Inspector kept his eye on the Morecambes. The wife looked merely surprised, but Morecambe’s face changed.
‘Now, Mrs Sterne,’ said Parker, ‘have you ever seen this gentleman before?’
‘Why, yes, sir; this is Mr Field, as was staying with Mr Weldon down at Fourways in February. I’d know him anywhere.’
‘That’s who he is, is he?’ sai
d the stout gentleman. ‘I thought it might be Potts or Spink. Well, Mr Maurice Vavasour, did you give the little Kohn girl a show after all?’
Mr Morecambe opened his mouth, but no sound came. Inspector Umpelty consulted the Scotland Yard man by a glance, cleared his throat, took his courage in both hands, and advanced upon his prey:
‘Alfred Morecambe,’ he said, ‘alias William Bright, alias William Simpson, alias Field, alias Cedric St Denis, alias Maurice Vavasour, I arrest you for being concerned in the murder of Paul Alexis Goldschmidt, otherwise Pavlo Alexeivitch, and I warn you that anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence at your trial.’
He wiped his forehead.
Alibi or no alibi, he had burnt his boats.
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.’