It was true, also, that Bob’s explanation had not covered everything. Any explanation would have been, perhaps, open to suspicion if it had. On the subject of the letter discovered in the typists’ room, for instance. Bob had simply said that he knew nothing about it. He had never received it. If he was speaking the truth, it began to look very much as if the letter might be a plant. The possibility had been in Hazlerigg’s mind all along; ever since he had noticed those pin-marks in the top left-hand corner of the paper. He had remembered that it was quite a common habit for a busy man to pin cheques or receipted bills to blank pieces of notepaper with or without the addition of a signature. Lawyers got them every day. Indeed, now he thought of it, had not Plumptree told him that Smallbone had pinned his last rent cheque to a piece of notepaper and left it on the hall table for Mrs. Tasker to find. Anyone in the office might therefore have received such a missive from Smallbone. They would only have to remove the cheque and they could then type in what message they liked in the space between the address and the signature. Forgery without tears.
“You see them going off from Paddington,” said the stout girl. “Torquay, Paignton, and places like that. Piles and piles of luggage. I don’t call that a holiday.”
“Nor do I,” said the Yes-girl.
“But take a nice large rucksack,” said the stout girl, nodding down at hers, where it stood, bulging formidably, on the seat beside her.
With a sweet click the last tumbler fell into place.
“God in heaven, what idiots we’ve been,” said Hazlerigg loudly.
Both girls jumped. Hazlerigg, who was a bit of a lip-reader, saw the stout girl forming the word “Drink”. Her companion, for once, had an opinion of her own: “Barmy.”
“When does this train stop next?” he demanded.
The stout girl felt for her alpenstock and estimated with a quick glance the distance to the corridor door. “It doesn’t stop,” she said. “It goes straight through to London.”
“Then stop it we must,” said Hazlerigg. Out of the window he saw the lights of a fair-sized town approaching.
He got to his feet and before either of his travelling companions could guess his intention, he had reached up and jerked the communication cord.
He could not have timed it more perfectly. There was a momentary pause as the vacuum brake took charge: then a series of shuddering jolts, a sharp decrease in momentum. The dark world outside slowed down, the blur of lights separated out into individual windows, and with a long, indignant hiss, the train slid to a halt opposite the deserted platform of a fair-sized station.
Hazlerigg was out before it had fairly stopped.
A door marked “Stationmaster” flung open and a startled and indignant official appeared. Hazlerigg said a word to him, produced his warrant card, and fairly trundled him back into his office.
“I want to use your telephone,” he said. “You’ve got some priority arrangement for up-calls to London. Use it, please, and get me Scotland Yard.”
The stationmaster got busy.
Hazlerigg looked back on to the platform. Heads were out all the way down the train, and he could see the bobbing of a lantern as one of the guards climbed the ramp. He reckoned the situation was just in hand.
Five seconds later he was talking to Sergeant Plumptree.
“Look here,” he said. “You’ll have to listen and not ask questions. I’ve just stopped the Cromer Express and I reckon I’ve got two minutes. Get hold of that chap Hayman—the shop assistant in that bag shop in the Strand—yes—Miss Chittering’s boy friend. I want to find out who bought a rucksack there on the morning of—let me see—Saturday, February 20th. A large green rucksack. Play fair. Show him all the photographs. Yes, I know it’s Saturday night. I don’t care how you set about it. You can ask for what help you like. If he isn’t at home, put out a general alert and pick him up where you find him. At the cinema, at the pub, on the streets. This train is due at Liverpool Street at a quarter past ten, and I want you to get the information and meet me at the station with a police car and a good driver. I know it doesn’t leave you much time, but that’s the way it’s got to be.”
He rang off, thanked the stationmaster politely, and stepped out on to the platform into the arms of a deeply-suspicious guard. The time was nine-fifteen.
Chapter Fifteen —Saturday Night— Completion
We cannot force our memories: they must come of themselves by natural association, as it were; but they may occur to us when we least think of them, owing to some casual circumstance or link of connection, and long after we have given up the search.
Hazlitt: On Application to Study
I
At about nine o’clock that evening Bohun was sitting in his upper room, underneath the portrait of the severe lady (who was his grandmother) and he was thinking about developments in automatic accounting machinery. He had seen an up-to-date model demonstrated recently. Accounts were fed into it in the form of cards, each card being punched with a combination of holes and slots representing the figures of the account. The machine would then perform any operation of addition, subtraction, proportion, collation or extraction which the abstrusest fancy of the accountant might dictate. What had particularly amused Bohun had been that on an incorrectly punched card being inserted, the machine gave a most human scream, a red light shone, and the card was ejected on to the floor. It occurred to him that this was exactly what was wrong with the proposition of Bob Horniman as murderer. Every time he presented that particular card to his mental processes they as promptly rejected it.
Principally it was the matter of motive.
One of the suggested motives might be the correct one. Both together were impossible.
You could believe in an impetuous, hot-headed, warm-hearted type who came to the conclusion that if Smallbone was capable of tormenting a dying man then Smallbone himself was better dead. One or two people might reasonably have maintained such a proposition since it seemed that the late Abel Horniman, for all his faults, had been a man capable of inspiring both loyalty and affection. On the other hand you could believe in a cold-blooded type, one who calculated that, if he shut Smallbone’s mouth and thus postponed the coming to light of the Husbandmen’s Mortgage fraud, he might have a chance to sell out his share in the firm and get away with twenty thousand pounds.
It was when you made both of them the same person that you were talking nonsense.
Apart from this there was the consideration that if Bob Horniman had committed the murder on his Saturday morning at the office, then Anne Mildmay must almost certainly have been privy to it. Their statements proved this. They said they had left the office together at ten past twelve and had parted at about twenty past. Now with Smallbone due at the office at twelve-fifteen (vide his letter) either this meant that they were both lying about times or that Bob had not left the office at all, but had got Miss Mildmay to perjure herself and say that he had. In which case she must have had more than a shrewd idea all along that he was the murderer. This Bohun refused to believe. There was something between them—you didn’t have to be very observant to see that. Anne Mildmay was angry and hurt with Bob, and there was a state of emotional tension between them. But it wasn’t the tension of guilty knowledge shared.