‘Yes. Yes, Inspector, I take your point. Good man, good man. Yet, let me remind you, we shouldn’t put our French bad hat altogether out of the picture.’
‘No, sir. No, of course not. I will bear him in mind throughout the investigation.’
‘Hah. Yes. Yes, Inspector, you speak blithely enough of throughout the investigation, but let me tell you once again: this is a matter which has got to be cleared up in the very shortest of times. All right, this PC Wilkins, Watson, whatever, whom you seem to have such faith in, would appear, thank goodness, to have eliminated the hundreds of extremely distinguished persons who might conceivably have committed this appalling crime. But nevertheless the yellow press will, if they get half a chance, hope to draw public attention to – well, to even the highest in the land. So action, Inspector, action.’
‘Yes, sir.’
When Inspector Thompson left the Commissioner’s office he had little hope that any amount of action would see the case concluded quickly enough to suit his chief. But, in the end, action proved to be what was needed. Directed more or less to go back to Lord’s, where by night and day a police watch had been kept, he made his way into the luncheon tent, everything there still preserved just as it had been when PC Williams had entered. Though convinced that it was only in the motives of the four people most likely to have committed the deed that the solution must lie, he nevertheless stood looking down at the stained white cloth of the table. A blank sheet.
Or was it?
Wasn’t there something there that somehow differed from Williams’ minutely accurate description?
For more than a few minutes he stood there puzzling. What was it that seemed somehow wrong?
Is it, he asked himself, the mere absence of that little tobacconist’s snuff tin from which the one deadly lozenge had, by chance surely, been plucked by that tight-fisted City solicitor? Nothing more than that? The tin itself, of course, had been sent to the fingerprint bureau at the Yard, and within an hour a report had come back to say that someone had scrupulously wiped the little shabby article clean of any possible clue as to who had flipped it open, taken out one lozenge – Wilfred Boultbee, so careful of other people’s money, was very likely to have kept count of his supply of the miraculous means of combating the intolerable pangs of indigestion – and added that one deadly other.
No help there.
And then… Then it came to him. What was missing from the scene as he looked at it now was an object PC Williams had described well, if with a touch of honest Welsh hyperbole. In the dead man’s hand, he had said, there had been a soiled white table-napkin clutched with demonic force. It had been, almost certainly, taken away with the body when it had gone for medical examination. But why had it been there on the table at all? It must have been left when the guests had risen from their places to go and stroll outside.
But – could this be what had happened? – had someone still had it, perhaps in their hand, after all the debris had been cleared away by the waiters? And had they then let it fall on the table in such a way that it covered up Wilfred Boultbee’s little battered old tobacconist’s tin? That could, if what Williams quoted me from his notebook had it right, have accounted for the unusual circumstance of the dead man forgetting to take a lozenge immediately after eating.
But which of them was it? Who had picked up that napkin, dropped it so as to hide the little tin, and then, of course, subtly urged Wilfred Boultbee out of the tent before he had gathered himself together enough to remember he had not taken a lozenge?
Well, if that is what happened, one thing is clear. It’s very unlikely to have been one of the women. I can hardly see either of them – I can hardly see any lady – taking that rigid man by the arm and laughingly leading him off. So it must come down to one of the two cousins, each with motive enough. Because, as I tried to make clear to the Commissioner, the French count, whatever he’s up to in England, could not possibly have known about Wilfred Boultbee’s poor digestion. So which of the two is it? Which?
Captain Andrews, the ruined man? The victim of the carnage which the civilised nations of the world have inflicted on one another? A man, you might say, with nothing to live for. Had he, as a last wild bid to acquire a decent income, murdered his tight-fisted, implacable trustee? A bid to free his wife from the daily toil of grubbing together enough to make their lives possible? Easy enough to feel sympathy for a man who had done more than give his life for his country, a soldier who had given all that made life bearable, had been left with the prospect of years ahead carrying round with him the body that the war had gassed out? Yet, if he has been driven to the last extreme of murder, he has to be brought to trial for it. Let judge and jury find what extenuating factors they can.
So, the Hon. Peter Flaxman? What about that typical example of the new, pleasure-devoted, careless world that seems to have come into being in the wake of all the horrors and deprivations of the years between 1914 and 1918? Is he a new breed, and a by no means pleasant one? A breed of self-seeking, hedonistic young people, uncaring of all below them in the social hierarchy? And is that, when you come down to it, what brought about the demise of a man altogether opposed to such a way of life? An old man who, you could say, represented all the virtues, all the strict morality, of an age on the verge of extinction?
Which of those two men is it – all but certain that one or the other of them put that deadly lozenge into Wilfred Boultbee’s little tin – who in truth conceived that deadly scheme? Isn’t the balance, however unfairly it might seem, equal between them? Each with the same obvious motive, each with opportunity enough, each offered the same easy means of finding a solution to their problems?
So which?
And only one answer. Startlingly plain, once one ceases to look at the human complexities and turns a steady gaze on the simple facts.
Captain Andrews, poor devil, has hands that constantly tremble, shake to the point, as Williams vividly recalled for me, of hardly being able even to hold a cigarette when he desperately wants to inhale the tranquillising smoke. I cannot for a moment see Captain Andrews carrying out that little necessary piece of legerdemain under the starched white table-napkin.
So, if it isn’t the one, it must be the other. Simple. Appallingly simple.
Right, I’m off to see the Hon. Peter Flaxman in his rooms in the Albany.
Or do they insist you have to say just Albany?
Whichever. It’s there that I’ll arrest the murderer of Mr Wilfred Boultbee, City solicitor, repository of a thousand secrets and tight-fisted representative of an age that’s going, going, gone.
Drummer Unknown by John Harvey
There’s a photograph taken on stage at Club Eleven, early 1950 or perhaps late ‘49, the bare bulbs above the stage picking out the musicians’ faces like a still from a movie. Ronnie Scott on tenor sax, sharp in white shirt and knotted tie; Dennis Rose with his trumpet aimed toward the floor, skinny, suited, a hurt sardonic look in his eyes; to the left of the picture, Spike Robinson, on shore leave from the US Navy, a kid of nineteen or twenty, plays a tarnished silver alto. Behind them Tommy Pollard’s white shirt shines out from the piano, and Lennie Bush, staring into space, stands with his double bass. At the extreme right, the drummer has turned his head just as the photo has been taken, one half of his polka-dot bow tie in focus but the face lost in a blur of movement. The caption underneath, reads DRUMMER UNKNOWN.