11: A Conference with the Chief

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THOUGH he had never admitted it to anybody, even to himself, Inspector Trimble was a little afraid of his Chief Constable. It was not that the Chief was a particularly awe-inspiring personality, or a stickler for discipline. On the contrary, he was a quiet, unassuming man, on the best of terms with most of his subordinates. Personally, Trimble had nothing whatever against Mr. MacWilliam, who had trusted him, promoted him, assisted him in every way. But there was none the less, barely perceptible, something in the Chief Constable’s manner towards him which never failed to induce in him a certain feeling of nervousness. He seldom criticized, his suggestions were always helpful and to the point, his behavior was invariably courteous and considerate. The real trouble, as Trimble finally came to realize, was that he never seemed quite to take his detective-inspector altogether seriously. The work---yes. Nobody could complain that MacWilliam did not regard that as serious. A more devoted police officer never existed. But through and above the work itself, during their gravest conferences together, Trimble was disturbed and secretly intimidated by the consciousness that he himself was under scrutiny---a scrutiny none the less searching for being quite kindly---and that the scrutineer was gently amused by what he saw.

Like everyone else, the inspector had his private creed---articles of faith which, once perhaps the subject of argument, had long since become part of his very nature, too firmly embedded there to be questioned or disturbed without the risk of damage to the whole fabric. The Chief Constable’s attitude struck at two of them simultaneously---the article that laid down the essential worth and importance of Detective-Inspector Trimble and the one that decreed that whereas he, Trimble, was gifted with an acute and lively sense of humour, nobody whose name began with a Scottish prefix could possibly see a joke. Small wonder that before this double assault on the citadel the garrison should feel fear.

Notwithstanding, it was with every outward sign of confidence that the inspector, with Sergeant Tate at his heels, walked into the Chief Constable’s room shortly after the interview with Sefton had been concluded. He found him, as usual, sprawling at ease behind a large desk entirely bare of papers. Mr. MacWilliam’s first action on being appointed Chief Constable of the county had been to abolish the tray marked “Pending” which had ornamented the desk since time immemorial. His simple system was to dispose of every matter as it reached him and then to pass straight on to the next. He contrived to combine this rule with a rigid adherence to the day’s timetable by a capacity for concentrated work which his quiet and rather casual manners entirely belied.

“Well, Inspector,” he began, “I thought I’d better have a chat with you and Tate about this Carless business. I skimmed through the papers you sent me this morning and it looks a bit troublesome---quite a bit troublesome. I take it you have been pretty busy?”

“Very busy indeed, sir,” said Trimble.

“I’ve had a word with the coroner, and I gather that the inquest is fixed for tomorrow. I presume that you will be applying for a formal adjournment?”

“Yes, sir. We shall not be in a position to carry the matter any further tomorrow.”

“Quite. And what exactly is the position? I’d like you just to run over the case as far as it has gone, if you don’t mind.”

Exposition was not Trimble’s forte. On paper his style was lucid and direct, avoiding with almost ostentatious care the stilted officialese of the ordinary police report. But when it came to explaining himself by word of mouth he found himself continually slipping into the worn phrases which he had picked up in his impressionable youth, and which modern educationalists have taught us to despise. His efforts to avoid them, and to find acceptable substitutes, reduced him from time to time to fits of stuttering incoherence. These were not improved by the kindly assistance of Sergeant Tate, who was always ready in an emergency with the very cliché which he was anxiously trying to dodge. By the time that he had finished, under MacWilliam’s quietly appraising eye, the sweat was pouring down his cheeks.

“Quite,” said Mr. MacWilliams. He said nothing else for an appreciable time, but remained leaning back in his chair with his hands in his pockets, his gaze wandering round the ceiling of the room, his full lips rounded as though at any moment he might give vent to a whistle. “There are several odd features about this case,” he said at last. “Let me see if I can sort them out. I dare say you have done so already, Trimble”---here his mild blue eyes looked suddenly into the inspector’s own, with an expression of complete seriousness. But was he as serious as he looked? Trimble asked himself with an anxious qualm---“but it would help me to run through them once more---if you don’t mind, that is. First point: Miss Carless has a row with Zbartorowski at the rehearsal. This results in the orchestra being short of a clarinetist. Second point: Jenkinson is engaged in his place and a car is ordered to meet him at the station, but that car goes to meet the wrong train and misses him. Third point: The car that does meet Jenkinson belongs to Ventry, and the driver, whoever he is, takes him to the wrong place, so keeping him out of the way until after the murder. Fourth point: Ventry fails to turn up at the start of the concert, so that the order of events on the program has to be changed. Fifth point: Somebody does play the clarinet part in the orchestra and that somebody disappears immediately after the murder is discovered. All these are plain facts, which don’t depend on the evidence of anybody who could conceivably be described as a suspect. Am I right so far?”

“Yes, sir,” said Trimble.

“They may not all be of equal importance, they may not all be connected with this crime---it’s just possible that none of them are---but take them together, they’re a damned odd set of facts which call for a bit of explanation.”

“I agree, sir, and my explanation----”

“So you have an explanation, Trimble? That is excellent! An explanation that will fit all five points, I presume?”

Trimble felt uneasily that he had stumbled into a trap. He considered for a moment.

“No, sir, not all of them,” he admitted. “But it doesn’t follow that all of them are connected, as you said just now.”

“It’s a good working principle to prefer the hypothesis of a single origin for a correlated set of phenomena to that of the fortuitous coincidence of two or more,” said the Chief Constable, a strong trace of Scottish accent appearing in his voice for the first time. “I’m not sure if I am word perfect,” he added apologetically, “but that, or something like it, was what I was taught in my student days. In other words, if these things aren’t connected with each other, and with the sixth and most important point, which is the crime itself, there’s been a most unnatural amount of rum goings on over this concert. Take them in order: If Zbartorowski had not refused to play at the concert, Jenkinson would not have been sent for; if Farren’s car had met the right train, Jenkinson would have played at the concert; if Ventry had arrived at the City Hall in time to perform his piece on the organ, his car would not have been available to maroon Jenkinson at Didford Parva, and Jenkinson might still have got there before the concert began. All these things had to happen just as they did before the unknown clarinetist could take his place in the orchestra, and if the unknown had not done that---well, it’s reasonable enough to suppose that we shouldn’t be discussing this case now. What do you think, Tate?”

Sergeant Tate, unexpectedly appealed to, took his time before answering. He shook his head slowly, swallowed twice and then observed, “It seems to me a regular House that Jack Built, sir.”

“A very, very good description,” said Mr. MacWilliam with emphasis.

“Thank you, sir,” replied the sergeant modestly.

Trimble was torn between contempt for Tate’s obtuseness and envy for the simplicity that could accept such a compliment.

“My explanation,” he said doggedly, “doesn’t deal with the first point, I grant you that, sir. But I don’t see that any explanation needs to. After all, the fact that the orchestra was short of a clarinet may have been just a fluke---the bit of luck that gave the murderer his chance. Suppose the whole plan to kill Miss Carless only originated after the rehearsal---took its starting point from that, in fact?”

“Very well, I’m prepared to grant that. What follows?”

“I look at it this way, sir. We are looking for a murderer who can play the clarinet. Ventry can, though nobody in the orchestra knows it. They are expecting him to take his place in the organ loft, and he doesn’t. Nobody expects him to turn up in the orchestra, and in any case none of them are looking that way at the critical time. The audience isn’t a bit interested either, except for two of them---Mr. Dixon and Mr. Pettigrew---and I wouldn’t give two pins for their evidence on identification. With the simplest disguise, or no disguise at all, he could have slipped in at the back of the stage and nobody been any the wiser. He says his car was taken from outside his house---I don’t believe him! I think he drove it to Eastbury Junction, ditched Jenkinson at Didford Parva and came back to the City Hall just in time to kill Miss Carless while the National Anthem was being played. That deals with all the points that matter, sir, and what’s more it gives you a hypothesis of a single whatyoucallem so far as the order of the concert being upset is concerned, if you follow me, sir.”

The Chief Constable, who had listened with attention, nodded slowly in reply. “Yes,” he said, “ye-e-e-s. You put your point very---very forcibly, Trimble. But you don’t seem to me to have covered point two.”

“Point two, sir?”

“The fact that Farren’s car went to meet the wrong train.”

“Well, that may have been just coincidence, sir. It made things easier for Ventry, I admit. But I don’t see why he may not have gone to the station to catch Jenkinson just the same. If he got there in good time and hung about at the entrance and asked for Jenkinson as soon as he appeared, ten to one he’d pick him up under the nose of a hired driver who’d wait till he was looked for.”

“That would be taking a bit of a risk,” Mr. MacWilliam objected. “And talking of risks, I don’t quite see why he should have bothered to go through all this business, which simply had the effect of drawing attention to his own absence from the organ loft. Assuming he arrived at the City Hall just in time to kill Miss Carless while the National Anthem was being played---the noise would drown any sounds of a struggle from behind the stage, I suppose---why not go straight up to the organ and play his piece as he was expected to?”

“Perhaps he didn’t feel equal to playing the organ right after committing a murder,” the inspector suggested.

“You may be right there, but---you were about to say something, Sergeant?”

“I was only going to call your attention to the recorded case of George Joseph Smith, sir,” said Tate.

“Thank you, Sergeant. That is most valuable. Although the argument from analogy is apt to be fallacious. Besides, Smith didn’t give a concert performance after he had drowned the lady in her bath but merely played for his own delectation. No---there is something else about points two and three that troubles me a good deal more. Did Ventry know that Jenkinson was expected by that particular train? Did he know that Jenkinson was expected at all? Because if he did not, the whole theory, with the greatest respect to you, Inspector, seems to me to fall to the ground.”

“Well, he must have, sir, mustn’t he?”

“Must have, Trimble? I’m not sure that I follow you.”

“Because if he didn’t know, he couldn’t have planned to take Jenkinson’s place.”

“I see that we are in agreement after all. You put the point differently to myself, but it comes to the same thing,” said the Chief Constable politely. Trimble, feeling vaguely that he was being “got at,” shifted uneasily in his chair. “Now, as I understand the position,” he went on, “Ventry, according to his own account, at any rate, came straight home after the rehearsal had been interrupted, and did not leave his house again until he was due to drive down to the concert. But Jenkinson was not engaged for the concert until some time after that, and Farren’s car was ordered later still. That was done by Mr. Dixon over the telephone, I remember, and several people were present at the time. Surely Ventry was not among them?”

“I’ll check that up to make certain, sir,” said Trimble. “Somebody might have told him about it, though.”

“With what object? Deliberately? If so, we have got to look for an accomplice.”

“That seems very likely, sir,” the inspector said. “I’m glad you’ve suggested it. I’ve thought all along that this was a very complicated business for one man to have worked by himself. Look here, sir, how about this? The accomplice rings up Ventry’s house and tells him the arrangement. Ventry then gets on to Farren’s and alters the train to be met so as to make sure their car won’t get to the station in time to meet Jenkinson. There was some question about the exact time when the message was sent, I remember. Then he carries on as I suggested just now. That explains everything.”

“Excellent, Trimble, excellent!” said the Chief Constable with a warmth that was none the less a little suspect to the inspector’s suspicious mind. “I knew you would have an answer to my doubts. Now it only remains to prove that Farren’s received two messages and not one---and to find the accomplice,” he added.

“I’ll go and see Mr. Farren again,” said Tate. “Perhaps he did have more than one message, though he certainly didn’t mention it last night.”

“Do so, Sergeant. That will clear up one point, at any rate. As to the accomplice, I shall leave that side of the inquiry in your very capable hands, Trimble. It should not be too difficult to find out who was present when Mr. Dixon telephoned to Farren, so that will narrow the field a good deal.”

“Very good, sir.”

The Chief Constable had tilted his chair back once more and was regarding the ceiling with an exploratory eye.

“We seem to have spent rather a long time considering the case of Ventry,” he remarked. “But I have no doubt you have considered all the other possibilities.”

“Yes, sir,” said Trimble, “I have.” His voice sounded a little sulky, as it was apt to do after he had endured a long exposure to his superior’s good humour. He had provided a perfectly sound solution to the affair and the Chief had admitted that it was a good one, subject to the verification of some minor details. Why couldn’t the man leave it at that?

But MacWilliam was evidently determined not to leave it at that. Apparently drawing inspiration from the picture rail, which he was now studying with intense concentration, he began to speak at about twice the pace of his previous utterances.

“Suppose---just suppose---Ventry’s story is true,” he said, “---and you will, of course, Inspector, have considered the desirability of checking it so far as is possible---trying to trace the conductor of the bus that took him to the City Hall, finding anybody who passed his house between, say, six o’clock and seven forty-five and saw or did not see his car in the drive, and so forth and so on---suppose it is true, where does that leave us?”

Without waiting for an answer he went on, more rapidly than ever, “It leaves us with a number of possibilities, does it not? Sefton, for example. Is it possible that he may simply have killed his wife before he left the hall, and all this clarinet business be simply a monstrous concatenation of circumstances which has some other explanation and no connection with the crime at all? Have we any proof that she was alive after the time that he went for his walk? Alternatively, can we really be sure that he is telling the truth when he says that he can’t play the clarinet? We shall have to make inquiries in London as to that. If he can, then he might have taken Jenkinson’s place, although he obviously could not have had the time to drive to Eastbury and back by way of Didford. That would entail an accomplice again, who was familiar with the arrangements made for meeting Jenkinson. Then, failing Sefton and Ventry, we are still left looking for a man who can play the clarinet. Where’s Zbartorowski, to start with?”

This was a question to which an answer was obviously expected and Trimble was ready with it.

“I had not overlooked the matter of Zbartorowski, sir,” he replied rather stiffly.

“I didn’t for one moment think you would, Trimble,” said MacWilliam politely. “I just asked, that’s all.”

“I caused inquiries to be made at his lodgings last night and again this morning,” said Trimble. “He has not been seen there since yesterday morning.”

“I see. Well, that may be significant or it may be not. Meanwhile, if you can’t get in touch with him quickly, I suggest you could consult Mrs. Roberts.”

“Mrs. Roberts, sir? Do you mean the lady that plays the viola?”

“Is that what she plays? I mean the one who is on the committee of the Music Society, anyway.”

“I should hardly have suspected Mrs. Roberts, sir.”

“I’m not suspecting her of anything. I only know that I went to tea with her one Sunday a month or two ago, and Zbartorowski was there. I gathered that she had taken him under her wing, in the way she does. She introduced me to him, and I never saw a man look so scared in all my life. Have we anything against him, by the way?”

“Nothing definite, sir, but I’m pretty sure he’s been operating in the black market in a small way.”

“Well, that ought to help you to pick him up.”

“There’s something just occurred to me, sir,” Sergeant Tate put in. “If Zbart---if this Polish fellow played at the concert, wouldn’t he have been recognized by the fellow who sat next him? After all, he had been at the rehearsal.”

“Quite right, Sergeant---unless he had disguised himself in some way. Get in touch with that man, whoever he was---Mr. Dixon can supply his name and address, I suppose---and let him have a photograph of Zbartorowski, and of Ventry. Oh yes, and of Clarkson, too. He might be able to recognize one of them.”

“Clarkson, sir?”

“Yes---I was coming to him. He’s our next clarinetist on the list. Don’t you recollect, in Mr. Evans’s statement he says that it was necessary to engage two players because the only amateur available, one Clarkson, was not good enough to take the first part and wouldn’t play second?”

“That is correct, sir. He did say so, though it didn’t seem relevant to me at the time.”

“It probably isn’t relevant, but if we’re looking for a man who knows how to play a particular instrument it doesn’t do to overlook anyone who can. I should recommend you, Inspector, to investigate Clarkson.”

“I will, sir,” said Trimble resignedly.

“Those are the only two players we know of, I fancy. Now, is there any chance of our being able to find a crypto?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“I mean, another man like Ventry, who can really play the thing but doesn’t let on that he can.”

“I should think it very unlikely, sir, so far as the Music Society is concerned. All the playing members were actually in the orchestra at the time of the crime, apart from Ventry, of course. The only nonplaying members of the committee are the secretary and the treasurer---Mr. Dixon and Mr. Pettigrew. I shouldn’t think that either of them----”

“Neither should I, but just to be on the safe side you may think it worth while to make sure.” MacWilliam looked at his watch. “That seems to be as far as we can go for the time being, Inspector. Is there any other point you wish to mention?”

“I don’t think so, sir. We are, of course, conducting a search for Mr. Ventry’s missing clarinet and making the usual routine inquiries to try to trace the origin of the stocking with which the murder was committed.”

“Yes. With you, Trimble, I am sure I can take such things for granted. By the way, this is not a case in which you feel you would like some assistance?”

“Assistance, sir?” said Trimble, bristling.

“From Scotland Yard, I meant.”

“No, sir,” said Trimble firmly. “I’m not asking for any help from the Yard.”

“Very well,” said the Chief Constable politely. “I just thought I’d mention it.”

At five minutes to one Mr. MacWilliam, punctual as always, went out to his lunch. The inspector watched him go from the window of his office. Before him was a sheet of scribbled notes. They ran as follows:

Who was present when Dixon phoned Farren?

Did Farren get one message or two?

Conductor of Ventry’s bus.

Anyone else who saw Ventry’s car.

Was deceased alive when Sefton left?

Can Sefton play clarinet?

Find Zbartorowski---consult Mrs. Roberts.

Find professional clarinet in orchestra.

Find and interview Clarkson.

Get photographs of Ventry, Zbartorowski and Clarkson.

Can Dixon or Pettigrew play clarinet?

Trace stocking.

Ventry’s clarinet.

“That seems to be as far as we can go for the time being, Inspector,” he murmured with bitter irony.