Smallbone Deceased

“I know what you’re going to say. It occurred to me, too. You thought that Cockerill might have gone inside and quietly noosed Miss Chittering during the time that Mason was fooling around with that pigeon. I timed it the next night. He would have had about four minutes. I suppose it was barely possible—feasible, I mean, in a detective story sense. But apart from the improbability of it, there was one factor which I think ruled it out of court. I went along with Mason the next night to check up and he was quite emphatic about it. All the office lights were out. There’s a fanlight over the secretaries’ room and you can see at once if that light’s on. According to Mason it wasn’t. The reason for that’s plain enough, of course. When Miss Cornel had finished with Miss Chittering she turned the lights out and pulled the door shut—she didn’t want the body to be discovered at once. It would have made everybody’s alibis far more confusing, in fact, if the discovery could have been delayed until the next morning.”

“Yes. By the way, how did she get back into the building without being seen by anybody?”

“I don’t suppose she ever left the building. She probably sat, in the dark, on the next flight of stairs and waited till the coast was clear.”

“What a ruthless woman,” said Bohun. “And, incidentally, what a nerve.”

“A strong left wrist isn’t the only thing you develop in a Women’s Golf Championship,” said Hazlerigg.

III

“Darling,” said Anne Mildmay. “You remember that awful night.”

“Which awful night?” said Bob, looking up from what he was doing. “Oh, at Sevenoaks—yes.”

“Do you think I was drugged?”

“I don’t know,” said Bob. “You had a very advanced hangover the next morning.”

“But what would have been the point of it?”

“If you ask me,” said Bob, “it wasn’t drugs at all. It was two glasses of neat whisky coupled with the excitement.”

“And what was I supposed to be excited about?” demanded Anne coldly.

“The prospect of marrying a farmer,” said Bob.

Silence fell again on the little room, with its French window which opened on to an uncut lawn running down to a quiet river under a silver September sky.

“The joke of it is,” said Bob, “that I took up farming to get away from office work.” He wiped the ink off his finger on to one of the tassels of the tablecloth.

“Never mind,” said Anne. “Get on and finish that ‘Milk Marketing—Cows in Calf—Feeding Stuffs—1950–51—Estimated quantities’, and I’ll take it down to the post after tea.”

IV

That same afternoon, Bohun, back in the office, was drinking his tea (as a partner he now had it brought to him in a cup with a saucer) and watching Mr. Craine. No one, he reflected, would have thought that the cheerful little man had just completed a very trying six months. His reserves of vitality were amazing. He had paid off the Husbandmen and dealt firmly with their scruples about suppressing the details of Abel’s most irregular mortgage. He had used the balance of Bohun’s money judiciously to strengthen the finances of the firm. He had taken on three new assistants, and had snapped up the services of John Cove, now inexplicably qualified. He had undertaken the whole cost and the endless work involved in Miss Cornel’s defence. He had smoothed down the susceptibilities of innumerable clients. He had engaged a new, even more ravishing and, at the moment, inexperienced secretary. She was learning quickly.

“If Miss Cornel was mad,” he was saying, “then I’m mad, and you’re mad. We’re all of us mad.”

Bohun nodded.

“I’m glad she didn’t hang, though,” he said. “After she’d killed Smallbone—and the real reason, the inner reason for that I don’t suppose we shall ever know—everything else was self-defence. The killing of Miss Chittering and the efforts to throw the blame on to Bob. She was fighting for her life.”

“Do you know,” said Mr. Craine. “I’m not sure that even now I quite understand about that rucksack. And who was the little man from the Left Luggage Office that Hazlerigg was going to subpœna?”

“I think,” said Bohun, “that that was the most truly remarkable thing about the whole business. The single thin, unbreakable thread of causation which joined the body of Marcus Smallbone to the Left Luggage Office at London Bridge Station. It turned on such a trivial series of events, and yet it was strong enough to cause the death of at least one innocent person.”

“Strong enough to bring Miss Cornel into the dock,” said Mr. Craine. “It seemed to me to be the only tangible evidence they had. I admit it never came to the test, because she pleaded guilty—but all that stuff about rolling screws and left wrists—Macrea would have made pretty short work of that.”