Smallbone Deceased

“Admit,” said Hazlerigg, “that you expect me to spend my time sitting here asking a million questions. Occasionally moving round the office in a catlike manner, popping up unexpectedly when people are talking to each other, stooping to pick up minute scraps of paper and invisible threads of wool; all the time smoking a foul pipe or playing on a mouth organ or quoting Thucydides in order to establish a character for originality with the book reviewers—”

“Well—”

“Then, at the end of about seventy-five thousand words I shall collect you all into this room, and inaugurate a sort of verbal game of grandmother’s steps, creeping up behind each of the suspects in turn and saying Boo! to them in order to make them jump. At the end of which, when everybody is exhausted, including the reader, I shall produce a revolver, confess that I committed the crime, and shoot myself in front of you all.”

“Well,” said Bohun, “omitting the melodramatic conclusion, isn’t that just about how it’s done?”

“As a practical method of detection,” said Hazlerigg, “it would be about as much use as leaving an open creel beside a trout stream and expecting the fish to jump into it.” He scratched his nose thoughtfully, watched a small girl teasing a cat on the other side of New Square, and went on: “So far as I’ve found out, there are only two ways of fishing for men. One is to drop a grenade into the water: you might call that fishery by shock. The drawback is that you haven’t always a grenade of the appropriate size and power ready to your hand. The other method is more laborious but just as certain. You weave a net. And you drag it across the pool, backwards and forwards. You won’t get everything at first, but if your mesh is fine enough and you drag deeply enough, everything must come up in the end.”

“Well,” said Bohun. “I can quite understand why the detective story writers don’t set about it in your way. They’d never get any readers.”

“You’re right,” said Hazlerigg. “It’s a damned dull process.”

III

But even as he spoke the process was beginning.

Hazlerigg’s orders to his assistants, given the night before, had been explicit.

To Mr. Hoffman he had said: “I want you to go through the accounts and the papers of the firm. First I want to find out if they are solvent. They look solvent, I agree, but you never know. And even if they’re solvent I want to know how their profits at the present day compare with their profits—let’s say, ten years ago. I don’t want you to confine yourself strictly or solely to the money side of it. It’s wider than that. I want a note of any bit of business which is reflected in their papers and records which seems in any way out of the ordinary; any references which aren’t self-explanatory; anything which doesn’t quite fit in.”

Mr. Hoffman nodded. He was a qualified accountant attached to the Fraud Squad. A man who hunted down facts with the passionless pleasure of a butterfly collector and pinned them to his board with the same cold precision. His last six months had been spent investigating the affairs of two Poles who specialised in treading that narrow path which runs between bankruptcy and favourable compositions with creditors. Mr. Hoffman had dropped both these over-ingenious gentlemen into his killing-jar the week before, and was therefore luckily available to help Hazlerigg.

“I’ve given instructions,” went on the chief inspector, “that you’re to be treated as one of the firm’s auditors. Any books or papers you want will be shown to you. Of course, if you find that anything is being kept from you—that’ll be helpful, too.”

Mr. Hoffman nodded again.

To other gentlemen Hazlerigg entrusted the detailed investigation into the lives and habits, the pasts and the presents of all the members of the firm who figured on Colley’s List Two.

Into the life’s history of William Hatchard Birley, a Bachelor of Laws of Oxford University, who lived in a large sunless house in St. George’s Square, Pimlico, and spent a surprising proportion of his income on patent medicines.

Into the daily round of Tristram Craine, possessor of the Military Cross, father of two children and the owner of a house at Epsom.

Into the doings of Robert Andrew Horniman of Harrow School and the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, the passion of whose otherwise dull life was the sailing of small boats in dangerous waters.

Down into the questionable genesis of Eric Duxford, the colours of whose old school tie proved puzzling to the pundits of the Burlington Arcade, and whose expenditure seemed, contrary to Mr. Micawber’s well-known dictum, to exceed his income without diminishing his bank balance.