Murder Isn't Cricket, page 3
“Right, sir. That will do excellently. You, Lambert”—he called to the constable—“you go back in my car and bring the ambulance, and Sergeant Wharton.” He turned to the doctor. “I’d like a post-mortem as soon as possible, Doctor,” he said. “And let the attendant have the clothes to keep for me, will you? As little touched as possible. Tell him to put them in my room. If you can give me some idea of the time of death I’d be glad.”
“Um. . . . Bit of a job, Inspector. . . . Out here in the broiling sun. Let me see. It’s half past six. . . . Um . . . cooling . . . temperature when I took it was 94 . . . normal, 98.4. . . . Say not less than two hours and not more than three . . . that means between four-thirty and five-thirty o’clock. Can’t say nearer than that, Inspector. They’ll be the outside hours.”
With the body speeding to the mortuary, Inspector Carruthers turned his attention to the more serious issues. Hitherto, he had asked no questions since, at the outset, the dead man had presented no more problem than being a dead man. But the discovery of the shot-wound altered the situation. An unnatural death was a suspicious death. The inspector began his inquisition. “Who found him?” he asked.
“Old George,” the major replied. “Crombie, tell the inspector what you told us.”
George detailed his movements from the beginning of his round of the chairs and forms, ending up with his shaking of the still figure. “See anybody on the green at the time?” asked the inspector.
“No. . . . Only Mr. Bosanquet.”
“That’s me, Inspector.” Mr. Bosanquet stepped forward. “I came across the green to speak to Crombie. He’s my handy man about the place, and I wanted him to do a job.”
“Right. I’ll have a word with you later. What time did this match finish?”
“Just turned five-thirty.” It was Major ffolkes who replied.
The inspector considered the point. Half past five was the very latest time of death, according to the doctor. “That means that the man was killed while the match was in progress,” he said. “Did you hear a shot?”
The major shook an emphatic head. “Never heard a sound. But then, we were having a pretty hectic time. We dashed near lost the match, you know.”
The inspector looked at him pretty hard, and seemed about to say something. He changed his mind.
“Anybody hear a shot?” He looked round; but was greeted with negative shakes of heads.
“Did anybody see the man before Crombie found him? Anybody, for instance, see him take the chair?”
Again heads were shaken. “There were a thousand or more people here, Inspector. It isn’t to be expected that any single person would be noticed,” the major suggested.
“I see. Well, perhaps you’ll be able to tell me more when we know who the man is, and what he is. I’ll know that as soon as I have gone through his pockets. And I’m going to do that now. The sergeant, here, will take your names and addresses, and either he or I will be coming along to have another talk with you presently. Oh, there’s one thing more.” He turned to Crombie. “Did you touch this chair when you tried to wake the man?”
“No, Inspector. Never put me hand on it.”
“Did you, Mr. Bosanquet? I gather that you were the one to feel his heart and pronounce him dead. Did you put your hand on any part of the chair?”
Mr. Bosanquet screwed his face into a contortion of thought. “I couldn’t be sure, Inspector,” he said. “I didn’t take any particular notice, if you understand me. I may have put my hand on the back of it to steady myself.”
“Ah, well, we’ll soon know.” He wrapped a handkerchief round a stave of the chair, and, carrying it to his car, placed it carefully on the back seat. He squirmed into the driver’s seat and drove off.
The green at Thames Pagnall resumed its usual appearance of somnolescence.
The inspector had surmised that there was likely to be little difficulty in arriving at the name and address of the dead man. It was an assumption that, in nine cases out of ten, would have been correct. Most men walking abroad carry in their pockets, or on their clothes, some intimation of their identity; addressed envelopes of delivered letters, bills, visiting cards. The man who had found death on the cricket green had none of these things.
Inspector Carruthers, arriving at his office, found his sergeant staring, in unpleasant surprise, at the articles which he had taken from the clothes and had now arranged on the table. They were few. A silver watch, a fountain-pen, a pocket handkerchief; eight shillings in silver and twopence in coppers, a loose ten-shilling note, which had been with a bunch of keys and a pocket-knife in the left-hand trousers pocket. A small diary was retrieved from a top waistcoat pocket, and a letter from the right-hand inside pocket of the jacket. The sole remaining possessions of the man were a pipe and tobacco-pouch half full of tobacco, a one-ounce packet of tobacco, and a box of matches.
It was to the letter that Inspector Carruthers first turned his attention. A double sheet of notepaper, of the cream-laid variety, the writing on it occupied only half of the top sheet. It read:
Dear Mr. L.,
Why, of course. We shall be delighted to see you. Come along for the week-end.
Yours sincerely,
Kathleen Smith.
It was not until he had read this brief invitation that the inspector noticed one small, but exceedingly important, omission; there was no address. The top right-hand corner of the sheet, where usually a correspondent writes his or her address, had been neatly cut out.
The inspector regarded the mutilated corner with a frown. “Now, what the dickens has happened to that bit?” he asked himself. He turned to the clothes again, and searched hopefully through the pockets, especially the waistcoat top-pockets, in which the mere male has a proclivity for pushing bits and pieces of paper which he considers at the moment desirable to keep. But the sergeant’s earlier search had been thorough; no scrap revealed itself.
As he pondered over this problem his eyes caught sight of the miniature diary. “Of course,” he communed with himself. “Probably stuck it in there opposite the date.” He opened the diary, and thumbed over the pages to June 21—the current date—and from there proceeded to search backwards. But no missing fragment of paper was attached, nor did any entry appear in the pages signifying that he had an invitation date. Patiently, the inspector began his search again, this time among the pages in advance of June 21. Still he found no square slip or address entered under any date.
With this possible pointer to the dead man’s identity faded out, Carruthers settled down to examine in detail the entries in the diary. They extended from the third day in April to a date a day or so before that of his death—in fact, to June 18. Previous to the April date the pages were as virgin white as when they had left the printer. Inspector Carruthers waded through them. They appeared to be a record—and not too complimentary a one—of a tour of the countryside which the man had made. In April he had apparently been traversing, or ‘hiking’, through Yorkshire. An entry on April 12 read.
“B told me that I’d find the Yorkshire moors as adventurous as I should like. Too right he was. Lost in the fog all the day, and then found that I had walked back to where I started from.”
From Yorkshire he appeared to have wandered into Nottingham. There were the initials ‘S.F.’; there was a reference to R.H.’s grave, and then to a castle. “There’s history there, if you like,” the diary said.
Under June 11 was the comment:
“Cardinals knew a thing or two in those days—H.C.”
On June 12 was the note: “Kingston—King’s Stone”, then followed: “H.C again. Fair bonza.”
On the following day, June 13, the diary recorded:
“Saw S.F. today. Strange. Must look into it. May be interesting.”
From June 14 to 18 the pages were blank. On the 19th was the comment: “Very busy remembering. Got stuck up. Wrote to HQS.”
That was the last entry in the diary, except for the 21st—the day of his death. Written immediately underneath that date was the reminder: “T.P. Saturday.”
The inspector closed the book, replaced it on the table. “Doesn’t seem much to help in there,” he muttered to himself.
Further deliberations were interrupted by the entrance of Sergeant Wharton. He crossed to the table and looked down on the exhibits. “Anything there, sir?” he asked.
Inspector Carruthers grimaced. “Nothing that I can see is of any use to us,” he replied. “You can look through them presently and see what you think. But I’m no forrader. And you?”
Sergeant Wharton scratched a puzzled head. “Yes—and no,” he dissembled.
“What do you mean, yes and no?”
“Well, firstly, I can get no tags on who he is. Nobody seems to have noticed him. And that’s a damned funny thing when you come to think about it. You know Thames Pagnall, sir. Everybody knows everybody else and what they’re doing. They pretty well know what everybody is going to do. If little Elsie goes for a walk with young Tommy down Lovers’ Lane at seven o’clock at night, all the gossiping old women know about it next morning. How the devil it gets round in the time beats me. See what I mean? Here’s a bloke walks into the village and sits on their precious green. Yet nobody sees the fellow at all until he’s a corpse.
“Now, F starts off with the fellows of the Maplecot team. Thought perhaps, he might have been one of their fans. They’d never seen him before. What’s more, they hadn’t ever heard of a Kathleen Smith. I found half a dozen of their chaps and girls who had come over to see their team lose. No, he hadn’t come over in their bus, and they didn’t know him or anything about him. That left me with the village to go through. Seemed easy to me. Mother Smithers would be sure to know.” He looked at the inspector and explained. “She’s the old woman that’s supposed to live in the ramshackle cottage where the roads meet and where the buses stop, in and out.”
“Supposed to live? Doesn’t she live in the cottage, then?”
“No. She darned well lives on the front garden gate watching them who comes and goes, to see what they’ve bought or are going to sell. She’d be a dead cert. If an extra fly flew into the village she’d spot the insec’ and start trying to find out where it had come from. What happens? ‘No, I ain’t seen no strange gentleman hereabouts.’” The sergeant mimicked the querulous tones of the old woman.
“I says to her, ‘You come to the mortuary and look at him and see if you’ve seen him before.’ She derned near ran there. It was the first time she’d had the opportunity of seeing inside the suicide house, as she called it. Now, if she’d even have thought that she’d seen the corpse when it was alive she’d have said so, just so as to be in the news like. What does the old so-and-so say? ‘I ain’t never clapt me eyes on him in me life, Sergeant.”’ Again the sergeant mimicked. “I’ll lay ten to one he never came into the village in a bus, Inspector, or she’d have spotted him. That settled that.
“So then I goes all round the green. I worked out that he would have had to walk along some road to reach the chair he was in. And he’d have to pass houses; and houses have got doors and windows; and he was a stranger. But no, nobody could recognize the body. So I said perhaps he had walked to the green after the match had started when there wouldn’t be anybody on the road or at the doors, anyway, because they’d all be on the green itself. With that, I had a few words with George Crombie. It’s his job to look after the chairs and see they aren’t used by any unauthorized person—that means by anybody who isn’t a subscriber to the club funds. It’s pretty evident that the fellow wasn’t a subscriber, and that Crombie ought to have been after him when he took the chair. But he says he never saw him on the green until after he was dead.”
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?” the inspector asked.
“Why should he lie, sir?”
“I can imagine one reason, Sergeant. He’s not supposed to allow anyone not a supporter to have a chair. Suppose the fellow comes up to him, asks for a chair, and shoves half a crown into his hand for the club collection-box. He pockets it himself . . .”
“It’s the kind of thing old George Crombie would do, Inspector,” said Wharton, slanderously.
“Then the fellow goes and gets himself killed in the chair, and Crombie says: ‘I let him sit in it.’ What’s going to happen to Crombie?”
“The club would take his job away.”
“Quite. So is Crombie’s statement to be relied upon?”
Sergeant Wharton mentally masticated and digested the point. “I don’t think he knew anything about it,” he decided, at last.
“Well, you know Crombie better than I do, so we’ll have to accept your judgment. Where did you go from there?”
“By this time the village cop was back. He found the people who were occupying the chairs nearest to the corpse. They were a Mr. Irving with his daughter on one side, and a couple of fellows and girls on the other side. Neither of them remembers the man taking a seat, or bringing the chair up. Crombie insists that when he put out the chairs he put ’em all together. That was, of course, before the match started.”
“And that’s all?”
“That’s the negative side, Inspector. Now, there’s a couple of things that may help. The first I got from the party at Mr. Bosanquet’s. That’s the man in the big bungalow on the long side of the green, you remember. He was watching the match from his front lawn. Mrs. Bosanquet and three friends were with him. He said that he heard a shot fired while the match was on. At least, he thinks it was a shot, though he doesn’t know for sure, of course. He says it came from some distance down the road.”
“Down the road? But people don’t walk down the road firing a rifle.”
“Wait a bit, sir,” the sergeant remonstrated. “I got the names of the three friends, and questioned them separately. One was a Mr. Catling. I asked him whether he heard a shot, and he said, ‘A shot? Good lord, no!’ Then he stopped and asked who said there had been a shot. I replied that Mr. Bosanquet said he heard one. He laughed. ‘Oh, old Bossy said so, did he?’ he said. ‘And when did he hear it?’ I replied that it was about a quarter to five o’clock. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I heard that. But it wasn’t a shot, I reckon. It was a car backfiring. As a matter of fact, Bossy only heard half of it. There were two backfires.’
“The next person I saw was Miss Malcolm. Single young lady she is, and a friend of Mrs. Bosanquet, and has hopes, so I hear, of Mr. Catling, who’s a very-well-off young gentleman in the City. And a nice bit of stuff she is, too,” he added parenthetically. “She says she heard the backfires. They weren’t very loud and seemed to be some distance away. She said the first was exactly at quarter to five, and the second a minute or two later. She’s quite sure of that, because the first one made her look at her watch, because she’d promised to help Mrs. Bosanquet with the tea at a quarter to five. So she got up out of the chair, and the second one came just as she stepped into the kitchen. I checked her watch with mine and there wasn’t more than a quarter of a minute difference.
“The third guest was a Mr. Watkins, artist gentleman. He said that he heard the explosions, but didn’t pay any attention to them because he was watching the cricket. He couldn’t even say what time it was that they happened, but knew it was before five o’clock.”
The sergeant closed his notebook and put it into a pocket. There was a pause.
“Well, how does all that help?” the inspector asked.
The sergeant countered the question with one of his own. “Have you had any report from the doctor yet?” he asked.
“No. Why?”
“What I’m thinking of depends on the bullet-hole as to whether it’s feasible or not.”
Inspector Carruthers, after a look at his sergeant’s face, reached for the telephone and dialled a number. “Doctor Lumley?” he asked. “Inspector Carruthers here. Have you done a post-mortem on that chap? . . . Oh . . . just looked him over. . . . No. Tomorrow morning will do quite well. But there’s one thing that might be a help to me. We’d like to know a point or two about the bullet-wound.”
He listened for a moment or two to the doctor’s voice, then, covering the mouthpiece with a hand, turned to the sergeant. “He says it was a rifle bullet, probably a .22, but can’t be sure yet.”
“Ask him the direction of the wound—of the entry.”
Carruthers uncovered the mouthpiece. “Can you tell us anything about the direction of the wound, Doctor?” he asked. “What? . . . I see. He says it entered sloping slightly downwards.”
Wharton nodded an excited head. “All right,” he whispered.
“Thanks, Doctor. That may be a help,” said the inspector, and rang off. He replaced the receiver and confronted his sergeant. “Now what is it?” he demanded.
“There were quite a number of cars passing along the road by the green on that afternoon, Inspector,” the sergeant began. “And there were cars parked at the side of the road, on the verge of the green, too,” he suggested.
The inspector started. “You mean?”
“Supposing the backfires were shots, as Mr. Bosanquet thinks. Supposing they came from some car moving past. The bullet would go into the body sloping downwards, because they would be fired from a higher level.”
“Good Gad, Sergeant! It’s possible. We shall have to look into that. Or, of course, if they were fired from a stationary car at the side of the green, the same would apply. That’s a bit of good brainwork on your part. Now, what’s the other thing you have up your sleeve?”
“Tm not sure of the strength of this one, Inspector. It’s about old Gaffer Baldwin.”
“Gaffer Baldwin? Who the devil is he?”
“Village’s oldest inhabitant. Ruddy nuisance he is. Little bent old man. Sits outside the local all day and every day, waiting for visitors. They come to the pub, being very ancient, and looking it. Then Baldwin tells ’em fanciful stories of the village and the pub, and his own mis-spent life, in return for beer and baccy money. Says he’s a hundred, the old liar, and won’t live much longer seeing as how he has the bronchitis something terrible, and must have a glass of whisky every night by doctor’s orders, and him with only his ten bob old age pension to buy it with, as well as having to buy food. I know for a fact that the old scoundrel has five hundred pounds in the bank. I should say he puts a pound towards it every week.
