“Perhaps if you could tell me which table…?”
“Well, that’s exactly what I can’t do,” said Sergeant Plumptree. It had occurred to him previously that it might have been simpler to have brought Bob Horniman along with him, but apparently police etiquette forbade it.
As he was going the manageress said:
“I see that this gentleman states that he was at his table for about an hour. I’m sure that the girls would have remembered that. Six-thirty or seven-thirty is a very good time for tips and if anyone sits on for too long after their meal they’ll get up to almost any dodge to get rid of them. Why, I’ve even known them spill a whole pot of hot coffee.”
The girls were summoned again and the point was put to them. They were all quite certain that the young man in the picture had not sat at any table for which they were responsible for anything like an hour. “He might have been in and out for a quick snack,” said the thin blonde, summing it up, “but not an hour.” The others concurred.
Sergeant Plumptree came away thoughtfully.
VII
“I caught the six-forty from Charing Cross,” Miss Cornel had said. “I had to hurry to do that. Not that I need have worried. It didn’t start till about twenty past seven. It was absolutely full, so I had to stand. It’s an electric, non-corridor train. You can get a steam train to Sevenoaks. Why didn’t I? Because I didn’t know it was an electric breakdown, of course. And by the time I’d grasped that, the steam train had gone. Did I speak to anyone in the carriage? I expect so. What did I say? Well, we all said ‘Thank God’ when the train started. There wasn’t anyone in the carriage I knew—none of the regulars. They’d all got away on the earlier train, I expect. The only person I saw to recognise was the ticket collector on duty. I don’t know his name, but he’s got a face like a duck—”
Sergeant Plumptree found the ticket collector with surprisingly little difficulty. As soon as he mentioned Miss Cornel’s description the stationmaster laughed and said: “That’ll be Field. Face like a duck. That’s him. Donald, the other men call him. Donald Duck, you see.”
Field, who really did look quite startlingly like a duck, picked out Miss Cornel’s photograph without any hesitation.
“She’s one of our regulars,” he said. “Been coming up and down on this line for fifteen years. We get to know our regulars, specially during the war, what with the raids and one thing and another. Very friendly we got. She’s a golfer, isn’t she?”
“That’s the one,” said Sergeant Plumptree. “Now can you tell me what time—about what time—I don’t mean the exact minute—that she got here last night?”
“Last night?”
“Yes—at about twenty to seven.”
“You know what happened here last night, chum, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Sergeant Plumptree. He had a sinking feeling that success was going to evade him again.
“What with one thing and another,” said Field, “what with the people who was on the trains trying to get off and the people who was off trying to get on, if my own mother had come up to me and spoken to me, I shouldn’t have remembered it. And she’s been in her grave these ten years and more.”
Sergeant Plumptree finished a hard day by interrogating the taxi-drivers who ply for hire outside Surbiton station. Here he scored his first positive success.
Mr. Ringer, who owned and drove an ancient Jowett, immediately picked out Mr. Craine’s photograph from half a dozen others.
“Stout little party?”
“That’s him,” said Sergeant Plumptree.
“Came out of the station ’bout quarter past seven. There was a train stopped there—something to do with the current. Had been there more than half an hour. Some of the langwidge the gentlemen were using,” said Mr. Ringer virtuously, “wooder surprised you.”
“And this person asked you to take him somewhere?”
“Epsom,” said Mr. Ringer. “I wooder obliged, but I was waiting for a lady I always pick up. Pity. Offered me a quid. Woody be a lawyer, by any chance?”
“Well, yes,” said Sergeant Plumptree. “If this party is the party we think he is, he was certainly a lawyer. How did you know?”
“Norways tell a lawyer,” said Mr. Ringer.
VIII
Meanwhile, Inspector Hazlerigg had had two visitors.
The first was a Miss Pott, of North Finchley. She had been unearthed by a mixture of luck and imagination. Hazlerigg had put in an enquiry with the London Passenger Transport Board on the subject of complaints received as a result of the electricity cut. One of these seemed promisingly near the right time and place.
“I understand,” he said to Miss Pott, “that you made a complaint as a result of your experiences last night on one of the Northern Line Underground trains.”
“That’s right,” said Miss Pott, “and between you and me I’m sorry I ever opened my mouth. I was a bit upset at the time, or I’d never have done it. I can see now it wasn’t the railway’s fault. I mean, they couldn’t help it, could they? It was that awful girl sitting next to me—”
Hazlerigg slid a photograph in front of her.
“Yes. That’s the one. Every time I said anything, she just agreed with me. I said, ‘I expect we might be here all night,’ and she said, ‘Yes. We might’. Then I said, ‘Supposing the train catches on fire—’”
“Yes,” said Hazlerigg sympathetically. He felt that Miss Bellbas would probably not be the ideal companion for a long hold-up in a crowded Underground train.
“What time would it have been when you first got on to the train? About six-fifteen? I see. And when you got off it?”
“Well, I wasn’t home till seven-thirty, and I live almost opposite the station.”
“Thank you,” said Hazlerigg. He made a note of Miss Pott’s address. He had never thought of Miss Bellbas as a terribly likely murderer. But it was nice to be sure.
When he read the short note which Sergeant Crabbe had written, introducing his next visitor, Hazlerigg experienced a sudden sinking feeling, but before he had time to take any decisive action Herbert Hayman was in the room.
Herbert was a neat little man. He dressed neatly, and walked neatly, and Hazlerigg did not need to be told his calling.
“I work for Merryweather and Matlock,” he said. “You may have seen our shop. It’s about half-way down the Strand, opposite the Tivoli Cinema. We sell leather goods and luggage. We specialise in hikers’ and campers’ stuff.”
Hazlerigg said he knew the shop.
“I read in the newspapers about Miss Chittering being murdered in that lawyers’ office. We were going to be married.”
Hazlerigg said nothing. Construing his silence as a demand for further explanation, Mr. Hayman went on hurriedly:
“She was a little older than me. Well—six years, to be exact. But she was a wonderful girl. She had a wonderful mind. She used to surprise me, Inspector. The things she told me about the law.”