Smallbone Deceased

Mr. Birley weighed his symptoms against his powerful array of remedies, and finally selected a large green bottle and poured himself out a measured medicine glass of ruby-coloured liquid. He stirred it for a moment with a rod, then downed it in one. After this he inspected his tongue in the glass, felt his pulse, and closed his eyes again.

The dashes were still there, but fainter.

Mr. Birley repeated the dose twice and quite suddenly began to feel happier. (This was not actually surprising, since what he was drinking was, had he known it, very inferior port masquerading as a health tonic and sold in small bottles at a very superior price.)

Mr. Birley went downstairs to his study and sat at his desk. He thought with distaste of Henry Bohun and with active dislike of Mr. Craine. He thought of Bob Horniman and, with no very great charity, of the dead Abel Horniman. He thought of the future. Ahead of him stretched unbroken reefs of trouble. Endless shocks to his nervous system; endless assaults on his gastric fluids; endless nights when fear of insomnia would prove more potent than insomnia itself.

After all, he reflected, he had no need of his professional earnings. He had never spent half of them and the accumulation of years served only to excite the rapacity of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

And lastly, and by no means least, if anything unpleasant did happen—and that damned fellow Bohun had sounded very confident—might it not be better if it could be shown that he had taken steps before…

He pulled a sheet of paper towards him and started to write.

VII

After supper that night Bohun put on his working clothes, told Mrs. Magoli not to wait up for him, and started out.

He wanted to think, and he had found that walking at night through the streets of the City was one of the best ways of thinking. He was not due on his watchman’s job until ten o’clock, so there was no need to hurry.

It was a lovely night, with high, packed white clouds and the moon playing hide-and-seek between them. Bohun made his way steadily eastwards, only dimly conscious of the route he was taking but certain with the certainty of a born Londoner that he could not stray very far from his bearing.

There were two distinct and separate problems. He saw that now. It was confusion over this prime fact that had created to date so much unnecessary obscurity. The first was the problem of who had killed Mr. Smallbone, and why had they done it—with the pendant to it, of why it had been necessary to remove Miss Chittering. The other problem was how Abel Horniman had managed to lay his hands on ten thousand pounds.

The two problems were connected, of course. Here Bohun felt himself to be on secure ground. The chain of causation, in outline, was as he had laid it before Birley and Craine. Abel Horniman had raised ten thousand pounds by some method on the windy side of the law. Marcus Smallbone had found out about it. Marcus Smallbone was the sort of man who was known to be untiring in nosing out scandals, indefatigable in his zeal for proclaiming them to the world. Therefore somebody who did not wish the facts to be known had removed Mr. Smallbone with a homemade cheese cutter. And seeing exposure threatened from some indiscretion of Miss Chittering, had removed her, too.

It was becoming increasingly and painfully plain who that somebody must be. Motive and opportunity were both evident. It was necessary now only to solve the fundamental problem behind Abel’s acquisition of wealth.

Bohun had reached this point when he found himself at Aldgate Pump. He therefore turned south-east and devoted his thoughts for the next fifteen minutes to a consideration of methods by which a hardworking, systematic, professionally knowledgeable, not very active solicitor might manufacture ten thousand pounds.

The obvious solution would be to dip into a trust fund—some fund of which he was, in effect, the sole active trustee. And this, as a first effort, was no doubt what Abel had done. He had borrowed the money from the Ichabod Stokes Trust. That did not afford a final or satisfactory solution. The system of solicitors accounting is designed to reveal such illicit borrowings, and beneficiaries, even though charitable in every sense of the word, are certain in the end to raise objections to the disappearance of substantial portions of their income. Realising this, Abel had very promptly paid back into the Stokes Trust an equivalent sum of money which he had succeeded in raising in some other and more ingenious way. The repayment into the Stokes Trust had passed without detection and, in Bohun’s opinion, would never now be proved, particularly since most of the relevant accounts were lost.

This left unsolved, however, the question of where the money had ultimately come from. It had been borrowed, he was fairly certain, but on what conceivable security?

VIII

“Thoughtful tonight, ’Enery,” said the bald man.

“Something on my mind,” said Bohun.

“A problem?”