Smallbone Deceased

“I rather agree. Well, here’s how it worked. Miss Cornel decides to kill Smallbone. She decides, for a number of reasons, that the best place to do it is at the office, on a Saturday morning, when she knows she will be alone. Then she must devise a hiding-place where the body may lie hidden for some little time. Eight or ten weeks will be enough. Fortunately, there is such a hiding-place. One of the boxes, so handy, so capacious, so fortunately air-tight. She selects the one least likely to be opened in the course of the day’s work, and steals, or copies, the key. The fact that this box happened to contain the papers of the very trust of which the victim was a trustee was bizarre but coincidental. But it was these papers, you note, which constituted the first real snag. And this was where the Horniman office system signally justified its founder. In no other office—in no other solicitors’ office in London, I think—would the disposal of a bundle of papers and files and account books have caused the murderer any embarrassment. There would have been a dozen places where they could have decently been laid to rest with other papers, out of sight and out of mind, collecting as the months and years went by only a further coating of black dust. In this office they would have been noticed in twenty-four hours—the fat would have been in the fire with a vengeance. Therefore they had to be disposed of out of the office.”

“Well, that oughtn’t to have been too difficult,” said Mr. Craine. “She could have—let me see, now—dropped them into the Thames.”

“In broad daylight?”

“Or taken them home and burnt them in her garden.”

“She particularly did not want to arrive at Sevenoaks station—where she was well known and very likely to be noticed—carrying a bulky package. The fact could easily have been remembered.”

“Then she could have—well, you tell me.”

“It wasn’t all that easy,” said Bohun, “and she thought it out very carefully. On the Saturday morning in question, on the way to the office, she stopped and purchased a large green rucksack. She had it wrapped up, as a parcel, at the shop—explaining that it was a gift for a friend—and brought it to the office with her. Once Eric Duxford had departed on his private business and she was alone, she took all the papers out of the Stokes box and proceeded to cut out, with her nail scissors, all references in the papers to Horniman, Birley and Craine. It wasn’t too bad, because it was mostly account books and schedules of investments—not letters. I expect she burnt the snippets then and there. The rest of the papers, now comparatively unidentifiable, went into the rucksack. After she had finished with Smallbone and left the office, she carried the rucksack with her—a little luck was necessary not to be seen coming out of the office with it, but Lincoln’s Inn is a very deserted place on Saturday morning. When she got to London Bridge she deposited it in the Left Luggage Office. She knew that unclaimed packages were opened after six months, but she reckoned that even when that happened no one would be smart enough to connect a lot of old papers without any name on them with Horniman, Birley and Craine, and thus with the Lincoln’s Inn murder. Ten to one they would have been sent for pulping without another thought. And further and more important even if the connection was noticed, there was no one to connect her with the rucksack. It was a common type. She had bought it at a large and busy shop and paid cash. And she had been careful that no one who knew her had seen it in her possession.”

He paused.

“It was a bit of bad luck, so shattering that it seems to belong to the realm of reality rather than the realm of Art, that this particular rucksack should have been sold to her by the head of the Camping Department of Messrs. Merryweather and Matlock.”

“Miss Chittering’s fiancé?”

“Yes. He recognised Miss Cornel and remembers that he mentioned the transaction to Miss Chittering later—even described the rucksack.”

“Yes, I see.”

“Imagine Miss Cornel’s feelings when, in the secretaries’ room, in front of almost the whole staff—including myself—Miss Chittering suggested that Miss Cornel should lend Miss Bellbas ‘her big green rucksack’.”

“Good God,” said Mr. Craine. “What did she do?”

“Kept her head. Turned the conversation. But I reckon she knew from that moment what would have to be done—and a week later she did it.”

Bohun finished his tea and rose to go. As he reached the door Mr. Craine surprised him by saying:

“I wonder what she really thought of Abel.”

“I think she was very attached—”

“Yes,” said Mr. Craine. “It’s funny when you come to think of it—the different way people see each other. I don’t mind betting the Husbandmen think of Abel as nothing but a crook. I thought about him—when I thought about him—as a damned good lawyer and a bloody difficult partner. To her I suppose he was a sort of God.”