Beware of the Trains (22 page)

By the time he got downstairs again his wife had made a full recovery from her pristine awe of him, and the news that he was proposing to leave the house once more was ill received. It is interesting to speculate about what would have happened if her indignation had prevailed. But it did not prevail: for once Barney was too excited to reckon the domestic consequences of argument and disobedience, and he had slammed out of the front door before Mrs. Cooper had got really into her stride. Outside, his excitement waned slightly. Harry Levitt was notoriously a tough customer, and to burgle his house with him in it would be, for little Barney, a very risky undertaking indeed. Luck was with him, however: a neighbour whom he met outside the gate told him that Levitt had just been brought in to the police-station for further questioning. Barney retraced his steps and fetched his bicycle. Copperfield wanted evidence, did he? Well, he, Barney Cooper, would see to it that he got it.

Some forty minutes later, standing before the fireplace in the left front ground-floor room of ‘The Elms’, with only a pocket-torch for illumination, he felt rather less confident. For one thing, he was still slightly breathless after his hectic ride. For another, it had turned unexpectedly chilly, with an unseasonable wind which blustered distressingly at the window through which he had entered. For a third, there was a dog howling somewhere close at hand; a dog whose voice rose and fell on the night air with a monotonous persistence which became, after a few minutes, extremely trying… Levitt’s dog? There hadn’t been any barking, but that was no guide. And whatever noises there might be outside the house,
inside,
by an irony, it was much too quiet for comfort. Funny, the atmosphere of an empty house. Funny how—

A switch clicked and the light went on. Shotgun in hand, Harry Levitt stood in the open doorway.

He was a big man, and in middle age he had lost none of his native vigour. The light shone harshly on his pitted, weatherbeaten face, and his small eyes were pitiless. From Barney, immovable with fright, his gaze shifted slowly to the fireplace. Then, without speaking, he crossed the room, twisted the rosettes and opened the iron panel. Groping inside, he produced the stiff, bloated hand of a woman, with the end of one finger cut away.“So you thought you’d keep the ring, did you?” he said. “You thought the hand would incriminate me enough without it. What a fool. What a greedy fool. What a stupid murdering little bastard.”

From behind the curtains in the corner Inspector Copperfield emerged. He said: “Barney Cooper, you’re under arrest for the murder of Blanche Binney. And it’s my duty to warn you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence at your trial.”

But Barney said nothing. He had fainted.

“Yes,” said the Inspector, when a Sergeant and a Constable had at last taken Barney away: “I’m sorry about all that pantomime of pulling you in for questioning. The only thing was, I was afraid he’d never dare come here unless he thought you were out of the way. I’d planted the idea earlier on this evening, see, by telling him that we hadn’t got enough evidence against you, and that we were going to search the house a second time. And when he talked about secret panels, joking-like, of course I didn’t mention this one you’d already showed us of your own accord. So now he’s cooked his own goose by trying to frame you: done to a turn.”

Levitt grinned, and spat into the fireplace.

“It’s a laugh, isn’t it,” he said, “me helping the cops out, at my time of life. I’ve been inside once or twice—as you’ll know—and you don’t forget about that sort of thing in a hurry. But murder’s something different. I’m not saying that bitch didn’t deserve it, mind. But just the same, she was the only girl ever took me seriously, and I owe her something for that, even if she did double-cross me when it came to the point… Ah well. That’s all over and done with now. Did he kill her for the ring, d’you think? It wasn’t worth all that much.”

“I doubt it. Taking the ring was an afterthought, if you ask me. No, jealousy’s why he killed her. He kept his affair with her pretty secret—”

“Affair!” Levitt interrupted. “Blanche! That shrimp!” He spat again, contemptuously.

“Ah. That shrimp, yes. But you know what sort of a home life he had…”

“I don’t know. And I don’t want to.” Suddenly Levitt guffawed. “Barney Cooper in bed with Blanche—my God, what a thought! But then, Blanche never did have any taste… You’ve got your evidence he was fooling around with her?”

Copperfield nodded. “You can’t ever hide that sort of thing from anyone as is really
looking
for it, so I didn’t have too much of a job digging it all up.”

“There’s one thing I don’t see, though,” said Levitt. “And that is, what put you on to him in the first place. After all, half the men in Lampound have mucked about with Blanche one time or another. So how did you come to suspect
him?”

“Just a bit of luck,” said Inspector Copperfield with unconvincing modesty. He collected his cap, finished the beer Levitt had offered him, and stood up; in his mind’s eye he was already conscientiously substituting
when I got there
for the more natural-seeming
on proceeding to the scene of the occurrence
in the wording of the report which he must write when he arrived back in town… “Just a bit of luck,” he repeated. “A
lapsus lingui,
as you might say—not but what the best authorities regard it as pedantic to use foreign words and phrases when an English equivalent is available. However … Point is, I called in at the bus-station this afternoon, see, so as to find out if you’d been on Barney’s bus. So I’m up there in the office, and I hear one of his pals shout to him,
‘Hi, Barney!’
this chap says,
‘Inspector wants to talk to you.’
And
‘Copperfield?’
says Barney, straight off…”

The Inspector moved towards the door. “Well, I ask you. A busman, chap who has officious blokes in uniform looking at his passengers’ tickets every day of his life, saying a thing like that. ‘Barney’s expecting me,’ I said to myself. ‘He’s got something on his mind…’

“And he had.”

Captain Vanderloor had never understood the English licensing laws, and on the evening in question he came rattling at the bar door of the
Land of Promise
at a quarter past six, quite unaware that since his previous visit we had changed to the summer hours. He got his drink, however (as always, it was gin and bitters) because my father sent me to see who it was, and of course I took the Captain round to the back door and my father served him in the kitchen. That often happened—at any rate, with people my father approved of. Strictly speaking, it was against the law, but the Hartford police hardly ever visited us at the Basin, and the local folk, and one or two of the yachtsmen, had been used to drinking in the kitchen for so long now that we had all more or less forgotten there was anything wrong about it.

The
Vrijheid
—Captain Vanderloor’s ship—had berthed that afternoon. Her monthly visits from Harlingen always provided an agreeable break in the routine of our tiny community. She was a grey, square-built, smallish craft, Diesel-driven, and she carried her cargo of eels alive in the hold (from the Basin they were shipped inland through the canal, and so eventually reached London). She would come up the Estuary on the tide, and then would follow the ticklish business of getting her into the lock, which was only just large enough. Like all the other craft, she moored on the west bank of the canal. She was manned by a mate, an engineer, and three hands, all of whom regularly took the bus into Colchester the evening after berthing, and there got drunk. And equally regularly, Captain Vanderloor stayed at the Basin and visited the
Land of Promise
.

He was a small, stocky man, with a close-cropped bullet head and an apparently permanent expression of gentle melancholy on his face, and he spoke English well, though in a decidedly guttural way. As a seaman he had rather come down in the world. He had been master of a large merchant vessel, the
Liverpool Gem,
which went down, it was said through his negligence, off the coast of Java. Plainly there was some doubt about what actually occurred, for he never lost his master’s ticket. But in any case the Company brought him back to Europe, and he was relegated to the comparatively humiliating position he now held. Very occasionally he spoke of the old days, but he never welcomed questions, and I think he was anxious to forget as much as he could. Certainly he seemed a good seaman—though in those days I knew little about the handling of larger craft, and know even less now.

A kind of ritual had grown up which always followed his arrival. My father would hand him the gin and bitters and say: “Good crossing?” And he, even if it was blowing a gale, would say: “Very fair,” and offer my father one of the thin black cigars he habitually smoked. This my father invariably refused.

There was no variation in the procedure on the Saturday evening I have in mind—except, perhaps, for the presence in the kitchen of our new maid, Anne, who was peeling the potatoes for supper. She was a plump, cheerful girl, with red face and hands, and she was already inclined to take a far too critical interest in my goings-on. But, as my father remarked, she was a good worker-and all things considered, it was just as well, for my mother had died when I was very young, my father had his work cut out looking after the bar and the Yacht Club gear, and Aunt Jessica was of no more practical use than Papo, the parrot, who sat squawking and whistling all day in the parlour. Aunt Jessica padded about in a pair of ancient carpet slippers—I don’t remember ever seeing her without them—and was subject to mysterious ‘attacks’, the significance of which I didn’t understand until later. Anyway, she was no help in our domestic economy, and to all intents and purposes the house was run by Anne.

The fact is, I never liked or trusted Aunt Jessica. For one thing, her appearance vaguely disgusted me (she was about sixty, with a good deal of straggling grey hair, thin, and with an extraordinarily long and pointed nose). And for another thing, the way she talked seemed to me unreal and ridiculous. She was my father’s sister, and my grandparents hadn’t been well-to-do people at all, but to listen to Aunt Jessica one would imagine them the flower of the Edwardian
haut monde
. Moreover, Aunt Jessica seemed quite unaware that the world had progressed—or, at any rate, changed—a certain amount since those days. In her insistence on out-of-date conventions she was somewhat of a museum piece. No lady, in her opinion, would do so-and-so; no well-bred child would say such-and-such. Please don’t misunderstand me; our own age isn’t such a model of courtesy and decorum that we can afford to laugh at the manners of other times. But Aunt Jessica’s maxims were purely unintelligent and mechanical—and in addition, she had, as I now realise, views about sex which were positively diseased.

I seem to be a long time in arriving at the events of that night. But before I do, two more things remain to be explained: the relation between Murchison and Helen Porteous; and the topography of the Basin, which you will have to understand if you are to follow what happened.

Murchison was a member of the Hartford Yacht Club. The club-house itself is about a mile farther down the Estuary, but a good many of the members keep their boats in the canal, the moorings by the club-house being very limited in number. Murchison had two craft—a fine thirty-foot power launch and a sixty-foot Bermudian ketch. I may add that the use to which he put this last did not endear him to genuine yachtsmen. He would get a party on board, switch on the motor, pass through the lock, run a couple of miles down the Estuary, anchor, produce a case of gin, and after an hour or so return the same way. To the best of my knowledge he never went farther, and to the best of my knowledge he never set a sail.

He was well-to-do, unmarried, between thirty and forty, tall and powerful, with a black moustache, an aggressively loud voice, and a total lack of consideration for anyone not of his own financial standing. At the time of which I am speaking his chief interest in the Basin was his attempt to seduce Helen Porteous—an attempt in which, for all I know, he may have succeeded.

Naturally at the age of fourteen I didn’t think of the matter in just those terms. It was a ‘love affair’ such as one saw on the films. But I well remember the night when Margaret Porteous and I crept along the canal bank and looked in at the porthole of the cabin in which Murchison and Helen Porteous were sitting. The tiny curtains hadn’t been properly closed, and we could see something of what was going on. It wasn’t very scandalous, I suppose; but at the same time it wasn’t quite the sort of thing two young children should be allowed to witness. Margaret whispered to me, in her queer, husky voice:

“I think that’s horrid.” I said as casually as I could: “It’s quite normal, you know.” But I must admit that fundamentally I agreed with Margaret.

Margaret and Helen were both daughters of Mrs. Porteous, who lived next to Charley Cooke, the lock-keeper. Margaret was thirteen and Helen eighteen. Their father had died some years before. Helen was thin but pretty, and fair-haired; she dressed well and appeared to me to use too much make-up. (At the time I was inclined to be puritanical about such things.) Shortly after my father opened the bar that evening I saw her get off the bus from Hartford, where she worked. She generally stayed in Hartford for the evening unless there was some good reason for her to be back at the Basin, and I wasn’t surprised when later on Murchison came into the
Land of Promise
with a couple of friends and announced that he proposed to spend the night on his boat. My father disliked Murchison (though, being employed by the Yacht Club, he couldn’t afford to show it). So did I. So did Aunt Jessica. So did Captain Vanderloor. So, in fact, did everybody—which no doubt accounts for what happened to him.