MR. ANDERSON frowned at the sound of the buzzer. Slowly, reluctantly, he rose to his feet and walked through the door in the corner of the room into the Home Secretary’s presence. People are prone to suppose that the private secretary of a Cabinet Minister is some young man on the threshold of his career in the Civil Service; some, perhaps, even imagine him a kind of stenographer. They do not stop to consider the differences between a private secretary, an assistant private secretary, a secretary shorthand-typist and a personal secretary. Mr. Anderson in fact was in the early forties; he was next but one in the department to be promoted to the rank of assistant secretary—which has nothing to do with secretaryship, but implies the control of a considerable section and perhaps a numerous staff. As private secretary, Mr. Anderson drew an allowance which, in days of a falling cost of living index (the corollary being a falling salary), was extremely welcome; promotion, however, was in his opinion overdue and would be extremely welcome, and, apart from financial considerations, would confer this great benefit that he would no longer spend the day popping up and down, just in the middle of something that called for concentration, to answer a bell like a chambermaid in a crowded hotel.
Besides, Mr. Anderson was tired of Cabinet Ministers. They might be all very well addressing huge crowds on vague political issues—Mr. Anderson could not imagine himself making a speech—but in office they were more trouble than they were wo th. If they ignored the department’s advice, they got themselves and everything into a mess; if they took it—well, they could claim very little credit. In fact, they wasted a great deal of time in wondering whether or not to take it, and in discussing the problem with their private secretaries.
Brackenthorpe was all right in his way; quite a good sort, and up at Oxford with Anderson’s eldest brother. But as an administrator—well, he simply could not get it into his head that the Home Department did things in certain ways, because those ways were best. …
“I thought as much,” said Anderson to himself, observing that the Home Secretary had before him the file dealing with the Comstock affair. Now there was a case in point: fancy taking the whole thing out of the hands of Scotland Yard just because an Assistant Commissioner had been more or less on the scene when the thing happened.
“We don’t seem much forrarder with this inquiry, Anderson,” said the Home Secretary.
“We!” thought Anderson. He made no reply.
“I—er—don’t you think we ought to get the views of—er—the departments concerned?”
“I understood it was rather urgent,” said Anderson. (“What on earth is he getting at?” he asked himself. “Only one department is concerned, and that’s the C.I.D., and that he has ruled out.” He almost smiled as he wondered what the Chief Inspector of Factories would say if asked to express his views on the Comstock Inquiry.)
The Home Secretary cleared his throat and glanced at the clock on his table.
“Let’s see. There’s a Cabinet at eleven, isn’t there? I must be off. I tell you what, Anderson. You’d better look through this file and—er—let me know what you make of it.”
“Very well, Sir Philip.”
The Home Secretary cleared his throat again.
“You’ll find on the file,” he said, “a memorandum which I dictated. Don’t—er—pay too much attention to its conclusion, which may be described as a little jeu d’esprit. But don’t forget that it’s all—er—rather—h’m—urgent.”
Mr. Anderson knew perfectly well what the file contained; he had long since read through the Home Secretary’s “memorandum.” He knew, too, that the Home Secretary had been on the point of reminding him that the papers were secret, and only just in time had remembered that no one was better able than the private secretary both to judge whether a paper was secret and to treat it appropriately (which does not always mean secretly) if it was.
The Home Secretary knew all this, too, and it annoyed him.
“There’s been too much delay already. Much too much. These—h’m—experts ought all to have got to work at once. I gave ’em forty-eight hours—”
“But not collectively,” Anderson remonstrated, in a gentle tone. “They would have fallen over one another, and perhaps there would have been a couple more murders. Besides, I understood you to say ‘forty-eight hours each.’”
The Home Secretary particularly disliked the reference to the possibility of further murders; for Anderson at the beginning had protested against the “expert” idea. Mrs. Bradley, he argued, was possibly a murderess already; Mr. Sheringham was almost certainly an accomplice after the fact; Sir John Saumarez (“not that that is his real name “) was married to a lady who had been found guilty of murder; and the Sunday papers had more than once linked the name of Lord Peter Wimsey … and, after all, his brother the Duke. …
“Well, it’s high time—” Sir Philip began, about to repeat his complaint of delay in the inquiry.
“Yes,” said Anderson, glancing at the clock and instantly assuming that the reference was to the meeting of the Cabinet; and in a minute or two Sir Philip, escorted by his assistant private secretary, was on his way to Downing Street.
When Gambrell, the Assistant Private Secretary, returned, he found Anderson frowning over the Comstock file.
“Look here, Gambrell,” he said, “he wants us to look into this. Why, God knows. It’s no concern of ours. However, we’ve both read the papers, and I suggest that we have a bit of a conference on them. We can take his room for the rest of the morning. Miss Head can hold the fort here.”
Gambrell was only an Assistant Principal, but he had some ten years’ service to his credit, and was almost as well versed as Anderson in the problems of administration; but on this occasion he was puzzled.
“How do we start?” he inquired, when the couple had adjourned to the comfort and seclusion of the adjoining room.
They sat face to face across a table at the far end of the lofty room. Anderson was tall and dark, lean-faced, with one eyebrow more uptilted than the other and consequently a permanent air of polite scepticism; he wore a double-breasted black coat and smartly striped trousers, and outside the office might easily have been thought to belong to the staff of the Foreign Office. Gambrell, in contrast, was short and chubby, with big round spectacles; he met the world with a stare of innocent wonder, and his rather shabby tweed suit completed the illusion that he was an overgrown schoolboy up in London for the day.
At Gambrell’s, remark, Anderson’s eyebrows twitched into a slight frown.
“I suppose we’d better treat this just like any other file—consider the action proposed, consider whether it is warranted by the facts—and, of course, whether the facts are all stated—and then consider what the results of taking the action would probably be.”
Gambrell did not dissent, though he had some doubt whether this procedure would answer very well in this particular case.
“Well?” said Anderson, discerning the doubt.
“By all means,” Gambrell agreed, “only there seem to be some—well, some preliminary observations to make.”
“Fire away!” said Anderson, pulling a pipe from his pocket, and looking very much more human.
“It struck me,” Gambrell began, “that the experts weren’t too anxious to report their findings to us.”
“I should not call that an over-statement,” was Anderson’s comment. “If we hadn’t managed to pinch Mrs. Bradley’s diary, we should certainly have got nothing out of her. Lord Peter Wimsey—well, we know about him. Sir John Saumarez omitted to invite any of our people to his séance, and if we hadn’t sent in a man in plain clothes—”
“Mr. Sheringham—” Gambrell interrupted.
“Yes, he was different. Anxious to explain his final opinions, but I gather the Yard man—yes, Moresby—had a job to get out of him all his earlier views and his facts.”
“It really looks as if the C.I.D. have a case to go to the Treasury for extra staff for liaison duties with distinguished amateurs,” Gambrell observed, smiling. But Anderson, removing his pipe from his mouth and fingering the file, recalled him to serious affairs.
“They seem between ’em to have unearthed a good many facts,” said Anderson. “But as I see it none of ’em proposes action based upon all the facts. Mrs. Bradley, for instance—she comes first in the file. The chief point in her case—her real case—is that there were only two revolvers. But thanks to Mr. Sheringham we know there were three.”
“Yes, but—”
“I know. The third didn’t fire the shot that killed Comstock either. We know that, from the police report that came in this morning. To that extent Mrs. Bradley’s theory still holds good. But if there were three, why not four?”
“Incidentally, the police report on the third revolver seems to do in Sheringham’s theory. They say it was two months or so since it was last fired—quite apart from the fact that this particular bullet wasn’t fired by it.”
“Let’s stick to Mrs. Bradley, shall we?” Anderson demanded. Gambrell shrugged his shoulders.
“I think we shall have to take things out of the order in which they happen to be in the file,” he protested stubbornly.
“As you like,” said Anderson, obviously convinced that the concession was foolish; but then the whole business had been so irregularly handled.
“Why not consider first who’s cleared by the various inquiries, and who is not?” Gambrell boldly proposed.
“And begin with the Home Secretary—in theory he seems to have confessed to the murder.”
“Plainly ridiculous,” Anderson said severely. “First of all, this business about the pistol being sent through the post, loaded—”
“There are people who break the rules of the Post Office,” Gambrell mildly suggested.
“Idiot! I didn’t mean that. But who ever heard of a butler handing a parcel to the Home Secretary in person just because it was marked Personal and Private and Urgent and all the rest? Aren’t those precisely the parcels which are always opened by a third party?”
Gambrell nodded.
“The fact is, the public imagine that a Cabinet Minister has to keep his own secrets,” the Principal Private Secretary was off upon his favourite hobby-horse. His Assistant was hard put to it to unseat him, mainly by referring to the obvious ease with which criminals could dispose of Home Secretaries if Home Secretaries and their butlers really behaved like that.
“Quite so. And in the next place there’s this business about a single-handed trip to a by-election. Appar ently some extraordinary kind of lunch-hour gathering, too. We know, my dear Gambrell, that Brackenthorpe didn’t go off by himself like that, and never does. The chauffeur took queer, and all that nonsense. Really, the public. …”
“The less said about motor-cars the better, in these days of economy,” said Gambrell. “If the Press got to hear about the carryings-on of the Cabinet, they’d shout louder than ever for us to have our pay docked!”
“Anyhow,” Anderson went on, resuming his pipe, “we know that the Home Secretary’s story is absurd.” He struck a match. “And all that that implies,” he added softly. “Accordingly, we wash out the Home Secretary. Who’s next, in order of precedence?”
“The Archbishop should have come first, I fancy?” Gambrell answered.
“The Archbishop is obviously cleared,” Anderson pronounced, “Wimsey does that—all that stuff about the bleeding. Mills saw the Archbishop off, then came back and found Hope-Fairweather polishing the parquet; then Hope-Fairweather went—and about the same time Littleton found the blood still running. The Archbishop is indubitably innocent.”
Gambrell agreed that that was so. “But all the same,” he demanded, “why that story he—or his chaplain—told Sheringham?”
“Isn’t that pretty plain?”
“Is it? That lie about business with Canon Pritchard, when the Canon wasn’t in Winborough at all at the time.”
“Don’t you see, my dear Gambrell? The Archbishop knew he was in a bit of a fix, or thought he was. As we know from the servants’ evidence, he did have the hell of a row with Comstock. And then Sir John Saumarez fairly picked on him—professional jealousy, if you ask me. And after that séance—mind you, Sir John produced no real evidence, but I daresay he reconstructed the interview up to a point—”
“You mean that Anselm Medium went home and got his chaplain to fake up a good story?”
“Yes. And it was a good story—all that about the signed article. Just the kind of thing the Archbishop would have liked to pull off.”
Anderson laughed, and Gambrell followed suit.
“Pretty cool, wasn’t it? To produce a letter which you haven’t posted as proof that you’re telling the truth about an interview to which the letter refers? That was what made me wonder. … But I agree with you, Anderson. Wimsey has cleared the Church.”
Anderson awaited the next candidate for clearance.
“Littleton,” Gambrell announced.
“Pity we’ve washed out the Home Secretary,” said Anderson, knocking out his pipe crossly into the waste-paper basket, and then stooping to prevent a conflagration. “His evidence cleared Littleton.”
“Incidentally, that was another weak point in his story,” Gambrell observed. “He said he stood there staring at the window, and though he saw Littleton, he never saw Hope-Fairweather. Yet Hope-Fairweather must have been in full view when he came to the drawer of the desk. Look at the plan.”
“Besides which, is it credible that Brackenthorpe continued to stare for a long enough time for Hope-Fairweather and Littleton to go and get their cars and drive out of the grounds? But don’t let us waste time. We’ve washed out the Home Secretary.”
His tone suggested satisfaction at the performance.
“By the way, about this plan of Hursley Lodge,” Gambrell pursued another side track. “There’s no scale, but according to Wimsey, it’s only thirty feet from the window to the wall.”
“Well? Pretty small, I know, but—”
“It’s true there’s no scale—” Gambrell went on.
“And yet the Home Secretary preferred to rely upon the local police, who produced the plan,” the other interrupted.
“Yes. But—well, I think Wimsey guessed at the distance from the size of the room. What he ought to have done, if he hadn’t time to measure, was to judge by the garage. Ten foot wide, at least; which adds ten foot to the distance from window to garden wall.”
Anderson fidgetted impatiently with the file.
“I was only going to say,” Gambrell persevered, “that I don’t believe that a bullet fired from one of those little pistols would still be rising at forty feet, which further disproves the Home Secretary’s story.”
“One theory at a time,” Anderson requested, “or since you prefer it so, one person at a time. Littleton’s next, I think.”
“I must admit,” said Gambrell slowly, “that I don’t quite see how to clear him conclusively. We’d better look into the various time-tables—”
“No, no. Not yet. Put him on a list of Judgment Suspended.”
“Mills, too, in that case.”
“If you like. It seems most improbable that he did the trick. I mean to say, to choose a time when the house was crawling with people—”
“You don’t think that may have been the very reason?”
Anderson frowned.
“Gambrell, you’ve been reading detective stories. You can’t put down Mills, because Wimsey surely has cleared him. Yes; here we are. Either Littleton or Mills is cleared. If Littleton’s story is true, that the blood was still flowing when he went into the study, then Mills can’t possibly be guilty of Comstock’s murder. On the other hand, if Littleton is lying—but I don’t see what possible motive he can have unless he’s guilty himself.”
“In either case, then, Mills is innocent,” Gambrell said, but he did not look altogether satisfied. “I suppose Wimsey is right about Mills?”
“It’s a matter of time-table,” Anderson replied. “A good many of the details which are down on one list or another are more or less irrelevant—at this stage. I assume twelve-sixteen, as per Wimsey, for the time when Littleton found the bleeding corpse—that seems to be about right, whichever way you look at it. Now there’s a brief space of time, twelve-eleven to twelve-twelve, or say twelve-twelve and a half, when Mills was alone. But if he’d done the shooting then, the wound would not have been bleeding at twelve-sixteen. I wonder, though. If we assume another half-minute error in Wimsey’s time-table and put Littleton’s entry at twelve-fifteen and a half—that’s three minutes. I wonder whether the blood would flow as long as that?”
“Matter for the experts?” Gambrell suggested.
“Yes. But assuming it to be possible, it seems to me more likely that Hope-Fairweather than Mills did the shooting.”
“I don’t see that.”
“It’s just that Mills knew that Littleton ought to be in the drawing-room. If he really looked in and didn’t see him, it seems to me incredible that he would have then and there risked everything—with an Assistant Commissioner of Police loose somewhere, but Mills wouldn’t have known where, on the premises.”
“If he’s lying—if he did see Littleton in the drawing-room?”
“In that case, would he have gone, the second after he’d shot Comstock, to interview Hope-Fairweather? One unwelcome visitor had already walked in unannounced into the study that morning—and that really is the strongest argument of all, it seems to me, for Mills’s innocence.”
Gambrell still looked a little uncertain.
“Well, if you still aren’t convinced, put down Mills with Littleton on your ‘Still Suspected’ list; but I insist that you put an asterisk against his name, to indicate ‘Highly Improbable.’ Now who’s next?”
“I suppose it ought to be Hope-Fairweather. But after what you’ve just said—about the time-table ruling him out unless there’s a fairly substantial error in it—”
“I don’t deny that there may be. It’s pretty difficult to estimate to a second how long it took Mills to see the Archbishop off, for example.”
“Still, before we tackle him, how about the unknown lady?”
“Mrs. Arbuthnot, you mean. Well?”
“There’s this much to be said against her, Anderson, that the easiest way to have shot Comstock was from outside.”
“Nonsense,” said Anderson. “Shot in the left temple —the ‘inside’ one, so to call it!”
“Yes, but obviously if a lady appeared at the window, Comstock would have turned towards her. … Remember the marks of a lady’s shoes outside the window? Mrs. Bradley found them, or Mrs. Bradley’s girl friend.”
Anderson laughed, all “man-of-the-world-with-more-experience-than-you-my-young-friend.”
“Quite a number of ladies walked on Comstock’s grass from time to time,” he said. “But that’s only one point. The other is about the temple. When I read that someone has been struck on the temple, I always mean right on the side of the head. You know, ‘going grey on the temples,’ and so on. I dare say that technically the temple includes the forehead above the eye; but at all events I made inquiries in this case—the bullet entered the side of the head, from the side. That clear? Very well: then whoever shot Comstock wasn’t standing face to face with him. And I really don’t see him making a point of presenting his profile to a lady who appeared from nowhere outside his window.”
“All right,” Gambrell agreed hurriedly. “All the same, there’s some funny stuff about Hope-Fairweather and his lady friends. All this about Lady Phyllis and—”
“I don’t see it, Gambrell. The story which Sheringham put together may very well be true. I imagine that Hope-Fairweather dined with his niece by marriage before he went on to the party where he met Lady Phyllis. I imagine that Mr. Mills was ‘acting a lie’ when he let Mrs. Bradley assume that his affair—oh, perhaps only an affair of business—had been with a typist. And I can quite understand that Lady Phyllis was thoroughly upset when she heard that her dear Sir Charles was mixed up in the Hursley Lodge business—either because he’d been there with an unknown female or because Mills obviously wasn’t above a bit of quiet blackmail.”
“That’s all very well,” Gambrell objected, “but remember that Hope-Fairweather’s companion was only his deceased wife’s niece. To suggest that Lady Phyllis would have been jealous—”
“It’s not an important point,” Anderson admitted, refilling his pipe. “But it’s pretty plain that Hope-Fairweather’s journey—or its purpose—was a thing he would want to keep quiet from Lady Phyllis. Mrs. Arbuthnot, qua Pytchley, may be a desirable relative, but if Comstock was blackmailing her … On the other hand, the news that Hope-Fairweather had been to Hursley Lodge and might have heard something from Mills would upset Lady Phyllis pretty thoroughly. It seems to me that both of ’em had good reason for being a bit secretive.”
“I see that,” said Gambrell slowly. “You think it’s certain, then, that Mrs. Arbuthnot didn’t do the shooting?”
“No, I won’t go so far as that—yet. In my opinion, we can’t consider her without considering Hope-Fairweather’s story. And the Home Secretary’s.”
“What, again?”
“I’m afraid so,” Anderson answered; his smile was not so much apologetic as self-satisfied. “Let’s consider Hope-Fairweather’s story. But before we do that, tell me what is the outstanding quality in a good Chief Whip?”
Gambrell considered the riddle for a few seconds.
“Tact,” he ventured.
“Right!” said the more experienced Anderson, “Without a doubt. Tact. Ability to handle awkward people and awkward situations without having a row.”
“I don’t see—”
“No need to see. Just keep it in mind. Now for Hope-Fairweather’s story. Short and sharp, wasn’t it? He burst into the study. Comstock staring out of the window. ‘Hullo!’ says Comstock, civilly enough, to a man he hardly knows. And more or less next second he falls down, all over his chair, and somehow gets himself underneath it. Hope-Fairweather doesn’t give him a thought or a glance. Just pinches the papers and hops it. That a fair summary?”
“I think so,” Gambrell said, with a nod.
“To my mind it was a devilish risky story to tell—or thing to do.”
“You mean you think Hope-Fairweather did the shooting, and this story was the best he could think of, to try to clear himself?”
“No, I don’t think that. I’m inclined to think either that Hope-Fairweather never went into the room at all, or that he was actually there, as he says, when Comstock was shot.”
Gambrell looked at Anderson with a puzzled expression.
“Aren’t you contradicting yourself just as Wimsey did? You know, the time-table was supposed to show that if Littleton is telling the truth about the flowing blood, then Sir Charles can’t have done the shooting.”
“Ah, but I’m prepared to show a margin of error in the time-table. In fact, I don’t see any way out of that—unless you’re prepared to believe either that Hope-Fairweather hasn’t got back the documents, whatever they were, or that some kind friend sent them back to him afterwards. I don’t see Mills doing that—and I don’t see who else could have done.”
“Farrant,” Gambrell suggested.
Anderson shrugged his shoulders.
“Possibly, but extremely doubtful. He would have had to do it immediately after he discovered that Comstock was dead, and before he gave the alarm. It isn’t likely that his first thought would have been for Mrs. Arbuthnot’s papers, whatever they were. Of course, if Farrant is the murderer—but we’ll come to that later. Let’s get back to Hope-Fairweather.”
“I must say,” said Gambrell, “that if Hope-Fairweather’s story isn’t true—or rather, if he isn’t the murderer—I don’t see why he should have told the story. It would be going out of his way to implicate himself.”
“Mightn’t he have a motive for that?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Gambrell. “I’m arguing on the other side.”
“My dear Gambrell, you can’t have thought things out. To begin with, remember that Hope-Fairweather did not produce his story when first he was summoned by our Chief to his august presence. At that time he had no idea where he stood, or what the police knew, or even what had happened. But after that things began to get awkward. Sir John had a go at Miss Hope-Fairweather; and Lord Peter Wimsey made a set at Sir Charles himself—but in doing so made it clear that he had at least half an eye upon the Lady in the Car.”
“Well?”
Anderson did not answer at once; he was having trouble with his pipe.
“My dear fellow,” he resumed, at length, “just think of Hope-Fairweather’s story. He gets in, unannounced. Comstock is standing by the window. He’s supposed to say’ Hullo,’ and be quite nice—which seems improbable. In any case he obviously would turn and face the newcomer. Hope-Fairweather might walk straight towards him or he might go towards the desk; I’m sure he wouldn’t walk towards the wall by the window.”
“Sorry, Anderson, I don’t see—”
“You must. If Comstock was facing the door to the office when he was shot, he was facing pretty well north-west. In which case the shot was fired from the south-west—from some way to the right of where the word ‘wall’ appears on the plan.”
“Very well. But still I don’t see—”
“Just keep it in mind. In the second place, don’t you think it a bit unconvincing, the way Comstock is supposed to have just ‘slithered to the floor,’ yet managed to knock over the chair and get himself more or less underneath it? And thirdly” (Anderson went on hurriedly, since Gambrell manifested a tendency to mutter “I don’t see”), “d’you think that Hope-Fairweather, or anyone else, could watch even Comstock fall in a heap and make no attempt to see what was the matter?”
“Perhaps he did—” Gambrell began.
“So I think. And when he realized that Comstock had been shot he decided not to give the alarm. … That’s just the difference—you might or might not call for help, but you certainly would not, so to speak, ignore the fellow’s collapse.”
“Yes, but I don’t—”
“Oh, for the Lord’s sake don’t say that again. Just listen to me. What happened, I suggest, was this. Hope-Fairweather went down with Mrs. Arbuthnot to try to get back the papers, whatever they were. He proposed to exercise his celebrated tact; Mrs. Arbuthnot made it plain enough that she didn’t think tact would do the trick. Very well: Hope-Fairweather was a bit uneasy about her—insisted on stopping the car out of sight of the house and on leaving her in it. He’s shown into the waiting-room, and waits there—hears the Archbishop’s departure, hesitates, and finally decides to enter unannounced. The decision takes him a minute or two, and when he does go in, or perhaps even as he’s opening the door, Comstock’s shot.”
Gambrell gave signs of a desire to interrupt; Anderson frustrated his objection.
“Hope-Fairweather hadn’t seen who did the shooting, but he made sure Comstock was dead and he pinched the papers, as he admitted, and he cleared out as quickly as he could. Tact again—tact for his own career. He found Mrs. Arbuthnot back in the car, and off he drove, with nothing said on either side, so to speak. The next thing is, he’s asked to come over to the Home Office. He tells his ‘I-know-nothing’ story—only to come up against the fact that the police know he had a lady with him. Obviously, he wonders how they know that—guesses that the fair Betty did not stay in the car all the time. After the interview he tackles Brackenthorpe—in the House, most likely—and extracts another fact or two—the slightly upward course of the bullet, for instance. On the other hand, Brackenthorpe suggests that the lady did the shooting, and sees that Hope-Fairweather has his doubts about her.
“No doubt they both agree that the less said the better, but at the same time they fix up more or less between them the story which Hope-Fairweather is to tell if by any chance there’s a serious likelihood of a charge being brought against Mrs. Arbuthnot. Its chief and subtle point is this—that if Comstock was standing up when he was shot, then Mrs. Arbuthnot, from the garden, a much lower level, couldn’t possibly have done the shooting. That’s the essential point of the story. Its other implication was, I should think, not intended—I mean that to fire the shot at the suitable angle, laterally, Mrs. Arbuthnot would have had to walk right past the study window, towards the kitchen garden—”
Gambrell pondered this theory.
“Hope-Fairweather was taking a risk, on his own account, all the same,” he persisted, “if he invented the story about being in the room when Comstock was shot.”
“Not particularly.” Anderson spoke in his most matter-of-fact tone. “Not if the Home Secretary promised him that he would make sure that it would be all right. And when Wimsey came along, the Home Secretary was as good as his word. He produced a story which satisfied Wimsey.”
Anderson paused and laughed.
“I dare say that what inspired our gallant chief,” he went on, “was Wimsey’s suggestion that the calling-in of the experts was the Home Secretary’s way of bottling the whole thing up. It suggested, don’t you see, that Wimsey was quite prepared to be bottled up himself. In fact, he made it pretty obvious to Hope-Fairweather—who obviously rang up Brackenthorpe immediately after Wimsey’s visit—and later to Brackenthorpe, too, that his sympathies were wholly with the man—or woman—who shot Comstock.”
“That seems to hold together. But what about the lateral angle from which the shot was fired, if Hope-Fairweather’s story was true?”
“Oh, that. Yes. Don’t you see, Gambrell, that that is yet another argument against Brackenthorpe’s story being true? He said he had a sudden idea of calling on Comstock on his way to Winborough. The angle of the bullet’s flight, according to Hope-Fairweather, means that Brackenthorpe’s car should have stopped almost at the far end of Comstock’s property, pretty well behind the trees there, and not square with the window. He’d surely have pulled up before that; and so, according to the policeman’s story, he did. By the way, don’t forget that he had had this plan to study—I’m sure he’s never in his life been to Comstock’s house at all.”
“Very well,” Gambrell said, as the other paused and relit his pipe. “Wash out Hope-Fairweather and Mrs. Arbuthnot—no, wait. If Hope-Fairweather’s lying, she may have done it after all.”
“Shot Comstock while her uncle, so far as she knew, was practising his famous tact in the self-same room, and strolled away past the gardener and into the car, all by the time her uncle got back? No, I don’t see it. Much more likely she began to go to the study window, out of restless curiosity, saw Littleton in the drawing-room, and thought better of it. In any case, how could she get hold of a peculiar revolver? The fourth in the case, that would be. No, I say, cross her off and consider the next possible suspect.”
“Scotney’s clear—though there are his finger-prints on the third revolver.”
“Weeks since it was fired.”
“I know. But how the devil—or why—did the revolver come to be where Sheringham found it?”
“Well,” said Anderson slowly, “here’s a theory—no more than that. Suppose Hardy, alias Scotney, came into the house at twelve-fifteen, as he says, and suppose he tells the truth up to, say, a bit after twelve-twenty.”
“More time-tables,” Gambrell groaned.
“I know. I start now with the assumption that Lord Peter correctly decided the time of the Archbishop’s departure, and that Comstock was shot at about—well, I put it at about twelve-fifteen and a half just now. In any case, the time was virtually before Scotney came into the house—there’s Emily’s evidence to that. I suggest that Scotney went into the study at about twelve-twenty, with his pistol in his pocket; he may always carry it—bandits and that—or he may have got all worked up to finish off Comstock. Most likely the latter; and then he finds Comstock dead, and he loses his head a bit. I gather he’s a nervous sort of chap—his life-history shows that. He feels he must get rid of the pistol at once, so he gives it a hasty wipe over and pushes it up into the cornice-affair, and then he just steps quietly out again. Emily had finished putting away the silver by twelve-twenty, by the way. Anyhow, Scotney goes to Mills for his orders, Mills being back in his office by, say, twelve-twenty-two, and then gets on with his job in the ordinary way.”
“And Scotney never recovers the revolver?”
“No. On my theory he knew Comstock was dead. He didn’t give the alarm—naturally enough, if he had meant to kill him himself. He’d slip away and lie low—as soon as he’d seen Mills—hoping that the weapon wouldn’t be found, or that he’d get a chance, before it was found, to get rid of it. But of course the place was full of police as soon as the murder was reported—he’s never had a really safe chance.”
“And, as you say, there are his nerves. Yes, I think that is fully endorsed. I suppose you’d argue that as an ex-crime expert of the Comstock Press it’s not astonishing that he had one of those revolvers.”
“Comstock, I imagine, got his specimen through his undischarged expert, so why shouldn’t a discharged expert get one?”
“I’ll give you Scotney,” said Gambrell generously. “And that brings us—let’s see—to Farrant the butler—Briggs the gardener—Emily—and the cook was about the place too, I fancy.”
“No,” Anderson pronounced, “you must give me all of them.”
“Expound.”
“Why, even if Farrant and the cook and Emily were all in a sort of gunpowder plot, none of them could conceivably have risked crossing the passage with Mills showing out the Archbishop, and with the knowledge that at any moment another visitor might be shown into the study. As for Briggs—no, that’s almost as unbelievable. Remember, he saw a lady wandering about the garden.”
“Why not suspect the servants, in spite of the crowd on the premises? You’re prepared to suspect Littleton, and what applies to Farrant applies to him—”
“Psychology, my dear Watson. An Assistant Commissioner of Police knows that he isn’t a suspicious character, just because he’s Assistant Commissioner of Police. The same can’t be said of a butler. Especially a butler who’s already left one bullet in the study wall.”
There was a short silence.
“Then it comes to this,” said Gambrell, “that there’s only Littleton left on our List of Possibles.”
Anderson shrugged his shoulders.
“I didn’t say so,” he said. “I’m quite prepared to believe that Comstock was shot from outside, and that he was sitting down when he was shot. Sitting in his chair and facing just about south-west—”
“With his back to the writing-desk,” Gambrell remarked scornfully. “What earthly reason—”
“Keep calm,” Anderson begged. “If only you had allowed me to go through the file in the regular way, you wouldn’t have lost sight of several essential facts.”
“What are they?”
“You’ve forgotten the thing which Mills forgot. And you’ve not observed that by proving the Home Secretary a liar, we’ve proved that one of his subordinates is, too.”
“Oh, hell! I told you that Littleton—” Gambrell began; at which moment the door opened and Miss Head half entered.
“Sir Philip’s just rung up,” she said. “He wants you to go round at once, Mr. Gambrell—”
Gambrell swore again, and hurried from the room. Anderson took up the telephone and requested the Exchange to get him on to Major Littleton, at his house.
. . . . . .
“So you’ve been into it, have you, Anderson?” the Home Secretary asked. He had had a good morning—the Cabinet had shown itself readier to listen to him than to the President of the Board of Trade, and on top of that he had had an excellent lunch. “And you have come to the conclusion that I ought to see Major Littleton?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Anderson.
“H’m. And you say that he wants to see me?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Anderson again.
Sir Philip found a space on his blotter which was comparatively free from geometrical design. He frowned at his rhomboid, wishing that his private secretary would be a little more forthcoming, without having to have his opinions dragged out of him. But what could one expect of a Civil Servant?
“You said something about self-contradictory statements made by the police, didn’t you, just now, Anderson? I think you had better tell me rather more of what you have in mind.”
“I said the authorities,” Anderson corrected him.
The Home Secretary looked up quickly, and half fancied (but it seemed incredible) that he had caught Anderson smiling to himself at his remark.
“Go on,” Sir Philip told him testily.
“I am unable to accept, sir, the statements made by or attributed to the police-constable who was knocked down by Major Littleton’s car and who is still in hospital.”
“Oh!”
Sir Philip’s pencil stopped abruptly in mid-tracery.
“I don’t so much mean his first alleged statement. You may recollect” (he fancied that Sir Philip would do nothing of the kind; he never read a file carefully) “that he is supposed to have said to his wife, “I was on my right side.”
“Well? Go on.”
“If he was bicycling towards Winborough, then he certainly was on his right side—but was he?”
“I really don’t know.”
The Home Secretary sounded impatient. His secretary no longer concealed his smile.
“You ought to, Sir Philip. The man is also alleged to have said that he rode past your car. Now you, sir—this, of course, is pure theory—stopped your car and stood on the running-board and looked over the wall at Lord Comstock.”
“That’s the idea—but as I told you, you needn’t take the whole of my—er—confession seriously.”
“I don’t, Sir Philip, any of it” (at which Sir Philip raised his eyebrows), “but if you had done what you say in your memorandum, you, being also bound for Winborough, would have stopped on—as it were—your wrong side of the road; on the right-hand side, the way you were going.”
“Obviously.”
“The constable’s second story is—or is alleged to be —that he drew out to pass your car and just then you drove on; and before he could get back to his proper side, out of Lord Comstock’s drive came first one and then another car, each on its wrong side, and so he never got back to his own side of the road.”
“Well?”
“I could perhaps swallow that if you hadn’t been going in the opposite direction to the constable. But since he wasn’t really ‘passing’ you but meeting you, obviously he had time and space to get back to his proper side. For that matter,” Anderson added thoughtfully, “I should have expected you to go outside him, over to your left.”
Anderson paused, but the Home Secretary made no comment. He seemed to be absorbed again by his blotter-drawings.
“I would add two comments, Sir Philip. First of all, in so far as your and Sir Charles’s stories fit together, they suggest that your car was standing well out towards the end of the Hursley Lodge grounds, and not bang opposite the study window; so that the story of the two cars dashing out on the wrong side of the road wears very thin. In the second place—” he hesitated.
“Go on,” Sir Philip’s voice sounded sorrowful, rather than angry.
“We know you weren’t there at all,” Anderson continued, “and therefore the policeman’s story won’t do at all.”
“Unless there was another car, not mine, and another man, not me, peering over. …”
Anderson shook his head.
“No?” said Sir Philip.
“No, sir. I don’t think so. You see, this second statement of the constable’s wasn’t heard of till after Lord Peter Wimsey had been to see Sir Charles Hope-Fairweather. Of course, it might be difficult to trace the telephone call from Sir Charles’s house to yours, but there would be no such difficulty over your toll call to the Winborough police-station.”
The point of Sir Philip’s pencil broke. Anderson was satisfied that he need not in fact request the London Telephone Service to give details of the call; he was sure now that it had been made, and that was enough.
“A career of crime requires a great deal of planning,” said Anderson. The Home Secretary smiled, remembering how he had battered the President of the Board of Trade, the ceaseless advocate of National Plans.
“I was a little hasty,” he admitted, “but I could not resist the temptation of arranging an interruption of Wimsey’s slumbers, in exchange for the bad night he had given Hope-Fairweather and me.”
“Very well then,” Anderson resumed briskly. “We now know that the constable’s second story wasn’t his story at all, but a fake.”
“Which leaves us with the first story, that he was on his right side—on the left of the road—and going towards Winborough.”
“Not necessarily, sir. It is quite a common thing for people to pronounce the ‘y’ in ‘my’ like—er—like the ‘i’ in ‘this.’ Consequently ‘my right’ and ‘the right’ frequently sound very much alike. And in this case the words are supposed to have been the constable’s first utterance on his recovery of consciousness.”
“Please go on, Anderson. This philology is most interesting, but—”
“The man was bicycling from Winborough, not to it, and he was on the wrong side of the road when Major Littleton crashed into him; Major Littleton being on his proper side, and at the same time no blame attaching to the policeman.”
“But if he was on the wrong side—”
“He was there in the execution of his duty.”
“Major Littleton is here,” said Gambrell, poking his head round the door in the corner.
. . . . . .
“Certainly, Sir Philip,” said Major Littleton. “It was obvious to me from the start that the all-important witness was the constable, I hadn’t actually got the Green Bicycle Case in mind, but, of course, the two affairs are almost exactly similar. In this case, the peculiar feature was, I think, that the ground rises inside the hedge of the property opposite Hursley Lodge, so that the lad who was fooling about with his air-rifle, calibre?15, happened to have a clear field of fire right over the road, into Comstock’s study.
“Of course the constable didn’t realize what the effect of the shot had been; he merely warned the boy—in other words, gave him a telling-off—for loosing off across a public highway. But, in fact, he actually saw the shot fired which polished off Comstock.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. The Home Secretary felt that an apology was expected of him, but he did not feel in the mood to give it. After all, Littleton had been behaving most indiscreetly when the accident happened, and no one would have expected Comstock to be shot by accident, by a boy of fourteen, home from school, convalescent from mumps, and fooling about with an air-rifle that was anything but a toy.
“I don’t know why I wasn’t told—”
“You hardly gave me—or the C.I.D. as a whole—much opportunity.”
Sir Philip was not finally defeated yet.
“I suppose you refer to my handing over the inquiries to other persons. In that connection, haven’t my instructions been disregarded? You say it has been established that the bullet was fired from this air-rifle. …”
“As to that, I would remind you that the C.I.D. were only—suspended—while the amateurs had their forty-eight hours. And I may add that the instructions to the local police to take the constable’s statement, now that he is able to talk properly and freely, and subsequently to examine the bullet and the air-rifle came direct from the Home Office. From Anderson, I believe.”
There was another pause. Major Littleton felt that his last remarks had sufficiently recognized that if it had not been for Anderson he himself would never have realized how intelligent as well as humane he had been to take such care of the injured constable.
“If I may say so,” he went on, determined to get a little of his, and the C.I.D.’s, own back, “Anderson was extremely wise to realize that in a matter of this kind, it is usually advisable—well, to ask a policeman.”
. . . . . .
“Not a doubt about it,” Anderson was telling Gambrell. “Of course I didn’t know what the policeman would say. I merely came to the conclusion that very likely the shot had been fired from outside, but not by Briggs, or Betty, or Brackenthorpe, and from a rather greater distance—which, of course, implied a different sort of weapon. Then I saw that there was a bank the other side of the road, and a point more or less level with the study window where there were no trees between the study and the bank. And then I saw that the place where the policeman was knocked over wasn’t far off that line—and it struck me that it might do no harm to find out what the policeman really had to say about it. In a way it was a forlorn hope, for if he’d seen anything sensational he’d surely have reported it when he came to, and was fully himself again; and then it struck me that he might not realize what a sensational thing he had seen. At all events it seemed to me to be —to put it mildly—worth while passing on the hint to Littleton. … After all, that was the regular thing to do.” Gambrell sighed.
“I very nearly spotted it this morning,” he said. “I was just getting there when you put me off by saying that there was something which both Mills and I forgot.”
“Put you off? That ought to have helped you. Just think again of the order of events, with the times, accurate or approximate, omitted. Exit Archbishop. Pause. Enter Hope-Fairweather—and at that moment Comstock swings round, away from the Chief Whip, in his revolving chair. Never even sees Hope-Fairweather, I fancy. And at that very second—over he goes, chair and all.”
“But the noise—there were only two crashes, and the second was Hope-Fairweather’s tray of papers.”
“Who says there were only two? Mills was at the front door when Comstock was shot. Littleton apparently never heard the first crash; why should he hear the second? Or if he heard it, he thought nothing of it. The butler and cook had moved on, after the Archbishop’s departure. Only Hope-Fairweather heard it.”
“According to the time-table—”
“Yes, but I’m pretty sure the intervals given on the famous time-table are too long. Hope-Fairweather was in the hell of a hurry—Comstock was dead, he had got his precious papers, dear Betty was outside in the car—he didn’t spend three minutes murmuring polite nothings to a fellow like Mills.”
Gambrell grunted.
“And what did I forget? “he asked.
“The reason why Comstock’s left temple was just nicely placed for the bullet.”
“Obviously he was swinging round towards the office door.”
“Obviously not. He’d have swung to his left, and if the bullet had hit him it would have been somewhere in the back of his head. No, I’m sure he never saw or heard the office door open—or just thought it was Mills, and paid no attention.”
“Give it up,” said Gambrell.
“What would Comstock naturally do after the Archbishop had gone? After they had had a furious row, in which Comstock had refused to give up his Anti-church stunt? Why, ring up his blessed newspaper, of course, and tell ’em to go for the Church harder than ever, say how he had handled the Archbishop. …”
There was a pause.
“Farrant corrected Mills, because he said he had touched nothing in the study. Farrant pointed out that he had stood by the window telephoning. … The private telephone, to the Comstock Press, stood on the window ledge behind Comstock’s chair, and Comstock was swinging round, to his right, to pick it up. …”
Mr. Anderson frowned at the sound of the buzzer. Slowly, reluctantly, he rose to his feet, and walked, through the door in the corner of the room, into the Home Secretary’s presence. …
Mr. Gambrell remained seated at his desk, a humbler variety of Mr. Anderson’s, and stared through his big, round, steel spectacles, at the fireplace. He wore a worried air.
“All very nice,” he thought to himself, “and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be true. But there’s only one thing that makes it true, and that’s the fact that the markings on the bullet show that it came from that air-gun. Apart from that—no, there’s really nothing. I imagine that the injured constable has told the truth, and that he did see the boy fire the rifle—it doesn’t follow that the bullet hit Comstock; the constable doesn’t assert that, either.
“Wait a minute, though. Is there no reason to disbelieve Anderson’s story? The essential, final proof is a thing about which we have to take the expert’s word. Might not the expert—in the public interest and all the rest of it—make a deliberate mistake about the bullet markings if the alternative was to put the police generally—and the Assistant Commissioner in particular—in a very awkward position?
“And after all if Hope-Fairweather did actually see Comstock shot, and if Littleton only went into the study when Anderson and the rest say he did, it seems to be a toss-up whether the wound could still have been bleeding then.
“If it wasn’t the boy with the air-rifle, who could it be but Littleton—with a fourth revolver in his possession of which no one knew but himself? How simple, to reveal the one which did not fire the shot, and to get rid of the other; simpler than Mrs. Bradley’s ingenious ‘faking’ of the barrel and hammer—though even that was surely something more than a ‘detective-story notion,’ for, after all, an Assistant Commissioner of Police has a specialized knowledge. …”
Gambrell’s gaze, still worried and unhappy, left the mantelpiece and travelled to his own desk. What was the use of his spectacles? Thank goodness, it was no concern of his. Anderson had certainly been right when he insisted upon handing the inquiry back to the police at the earliest opportunity. If you couldn’t go to the police in a case like this, well, where were you? When n doubt, whatever you want to know—and in this instance it was certain that the police did know, though whether they would tell. …
Gambrell’s eye lit up. His sorrow vanished. He had caught sight of a bulky file, on the top of his ‘in’ tray. He seized it and opened it. Yes, there was the paper which he had been trying to collect for the past week, and which it was so important that the Home Secretary should see at once. With no further thought for the tragedy at Hursley Lodge he plunged into a topic which concerned and therefore interested him—the Department’s proposals as to the attitude to be adopted by His Majesty’s Government towards certain proposals for the provision of rest and alternation of shifts in automatic glass works where work is continuous.
The buzzer sounded twice. Mr. Gambrell frowned, and slowly and reluctantly rose to his feet. …