The Viaduct Murder
by Ronald A. Knox
[Frontispiece: A map showing the railway line between Paston Oatvile
station and Paston Whitchurch station, and the viaduct where the
railroad crosses the river and the golf links. The Dormy House is
situated nearer to Paston Oatvile, while the Hatcheries is close by
Paston Whitchurch. Below the map is a railway timetable.]
LONDON .. .. .. .. .. | 3. 0 | 3.47 | ..
Weighford .. .. .. .. | 3.31 | 4.29 | ..
Paston Oatvile (arr.) .. | .. | 4.43 | ..
|--------|========|========
Paston Oatvile (dep.) .. | .. | .. | 4.50
Paston Whitchurch .. .. | .. | .. | 4.58
BINVER .. .. .. .. | 3.59 | .. | 5. 9
Dedicated by command
to
Tony Wilson
“In the matter of information, above all regard with suspicion
that which seems probable. Begin always by believing what seems
incredible.”
Gaboriau, _Monsieur Lecoq_.
Contents
I. The Paston Oatvile Dormy-house
II. In the Rough
III. Piecing it Together
IV. Endless Clues
V. On the Railway
VI. The Movements of Mr. Davenant
VII. Carmichael’s Account of it
VIII. The Inquest, and a Fresh Clue
IX. The Animated Picture
X. In which a Book is more communicative than a Lady
XI. A Funeral and a Vigil
XII. A Search with Piano Accompaniment
XIII. The Man in the Passage
XIV. A Chase, ending with a Surprise
XV. Gordon takes the Opportunity to Philosophize
XVI. Reeves promises to do his Best
XVII. By which Train?
XVIII. The Holmes Method
XIX. Mordaunt Reeves talks to Himself
XX. Proof at Last
XXI. The Test
XXII. In the Fog
XXIII. Marryatt breaks the Pledge
XXIV. Gordon offers the Consolation of Philosophy
XXV. The Dull Facts
Chapter I
The Paston Oatvile Dormy-house
Nothing is ever wasted. The death of the animal fertilizes the
vegetable world: bees swarm in the disused pillar-box; sooner or
later, somebody will find a use for the munition-factories. And the
old country-seats of feudal England, that bask among their figured
terraces, frowning at the ignoble tourist down secular avenues and
thrusting back the high-road he travels by into respectful
detours—these too, although the family have long since decided that it
is too expensive to live there, and the agents smile at the idea of
letting them like one humouring a child, have their place in the
hero-tenanted England of to-day. The house itself may be condemned to
the scrap-heap, but you can always make a golf-course out of the Park.
Acres, that for centuries have scorned the weight of the plough, have
their stubborn glebe broken with the niblick, and over-populated
greens recall the softness and the trimness of earlier lawns. Ghosts
of an earlier day will walk there, perhaps, but you can always play
through them.
Paston Oatvile (distrust the author whose second paragraph does not
come to ground in the particular) seemed to have been specially
adapted by an inscrutable Providence for such a niche in the scheme of
things. The huge Italianate building which the fifteenth Lord Oatvile
raised as a monument to his greatness (he sold judiciously early out
of the South Sea Company) took fire in the nineties of last century
and burned for a whole night; the help given by the local fire brigade
was energetic rather than considerate, and Achelous completed the
havoc which Vulcan had begun. It stands even now, an indecent
skeleton, papered rooms and carved mantelpieces confronting you
shamefacedly, like the inside of a doll’s house whose curtain-wall has
swung back on the hinge. What secrets that ball-room, those
powder-closets must have witnessed in the days of an earlier
gallantry, when the stuccoed façade still performed its discreet
office! Poor rooms, they will never know any more secrets now. The
garden, too, became involved in the contagion of decay: weeds have
overgrown its paved walks, and neglected balustrades have crumbled; a
few of the hardier flowers still spring there, but half-smothered in
rank grass, shabby-genteel survivors of an _ancien régime_. For the
family never attempted to rebuild; they prudently retired to the old
Manor at the other end of the park, a little brick and timber paradise
which had served the family for a century and a half as dower-house.
In time, even this reduced splendour was judged too expensive, and the
family sold.
No need, then, to mourn for Paston Oatvile; the sanctities of its
manorial soil will be as interminable as golf. An enterprising club,
seconded by an accommodating railway, has invested its rural solitude
with an air of suburbanity; it is only an hour’s journey from London,
and the distance could be covered in three-quarters of the time if the
club were less exclusive. Bungalows, each fitted with its own garage,
and cottages that contain billiard-rooms have sprung up in the
neighbourhood; thirty or forty of these, all rough-cast and red tiles,
conceal by a series of ingenious dissimilarities their indebtedness to
the brain of a single architect. In the middle of these—the cathedral,
the town hall, the market-place around which all their activities
centre—stands the dower-house of the Oatviles, the dormy-house of
to-day. The committee have built on to it largely in what is
understood to be the same style, and indeed, the new part is
undeniably brick and timber, though in wet weather the timber is apt
to warp and fall off. It is not only a club-house, of course, it is
also an expensive hotel—if we may call it an hotel, and not rather a
monastic settlement; for the inhabitants of these pleasant rooms all
live for one end—golf: twice daily they go round the course, with all
the leisurely solemnity of Benedictines reciting their office, and
every night they meet in corona to discuss the mysteries of their
religion.
Which reminds me that I have forgotten to mention the village Church.
There is still a village, that straggles mysteriously, like so many
English villages, in the form of a hollow square. In the old days, the
Church interposed itself between the village and the Great House, a
kind of mercy-seat through which the squire could be appeased upon
occasion. Though much older than the Park or the fortunes of the
Oatvile family, it had acquired, from its enclosed position, the air
of a parasitical institution, an undergrowth of Protestant feudalism.
To-day, it somehow strikes the eye as a by-product of the golfing
industry; people who ask the way to it (and they are rare) are
directed to the fifteenth green; the service on Sunday is at half-past
nine, so as to allow for the improbable chance of anybody wanting to
fortify himself for the morning round by divine worship; the sexton
will caddy for you except on the afternoon of a funeral. Conformably
with this, the incumbent of the parish, who is to figure in this
story, was a golfing parson presented by an absentee squire to a
living which offered few material attractions. He had managed to let
the parsonage, which was more than twenty minutes’ walk from the first
tee, and lived in the dormy-house permanently; arguing, not without
reason, that it was the centre of all the life there was in the
parish. If you are disposed to take a look at him, you have only to
open the smoking-room door; there he sits, this October afternoon of
rain and fog, with three equally weatherbound companions, a foursome
_in potentia_.
He was a man now approaching middle age, a bachelor and unambitious.
You would say that he had a clerical face—is that clerical face a mark
of predestination, or does it develop by natural mimicry?—but the
enthusiasm which it registered was, it is to be feared, principally
directed towards one object, and that object a game. He was
mild-mannered, and had been known to keep his temper successfully in
the most trying circumstances, even at the ninth; no oath was ever
heard to escape his lips, though his invariable phrase, “What _tam_ I
doing?” was held by some to have a relish of perdition in it. The
other three were acquaintances of his, as acquaintance goes at Paston
Oatvile, where you know everybody’s handicap, nobody’s politics or
religion. One of them, indeed, Alexander Gordon in nature and in name,
could hardly be known otherwise than by his handicap, for in politics,
in religion, in every subject that could form a digression from the
normal conversation of the dormy-house, his point of view was entirely
undistinguished and British to the last degree. He was not, like the
others, a permanent inmate, but was on a holiday visit to his more
interesting friend, Mordaunt Reeves.
Reeves was a permanent inmate, more by force of circumstances than
from any natural indolence. He had left school at the beginning of the
War, and had been incapacitated for active service by an extreme
short-sightedness which gave his face a penetrating, not to say a
peering, look. Work had been found for him easily enough in an
outlying department of the War Office, and he was perhaps a little too
fond of beginning his sentences with, “When I was in the Military
Intelligence.” The picture which the words conjured up to the
uninitiated was that of Mordaunt Reeves concealed behind the arras
with a revolver at half-cock, overhearing the confidential discussions
of German super-spies. Actually, his business had been to stroll into
a very uncomfortable office at half-past nine in the morning, where a
docket of newspaper cuttings, forwarded from another department,
awaited him. Singling out some particularly fire-eating utterance of a
Glasgow shop-steward, he would have it typed out and put in a jacket;
then he would scrawl across it: “Can something be done about this?
Please initial”—and so the document would be caught up in that vast
maelstrom of unregarded jackets that circulated aimlessly through the
sub-departments of Whitehall. An orphan, with a comfortable income, he
had found himself unable to settle down to ordinary employment on the
outbreak of peace. He had put several romantic advertisements into the
daily papers, indicating his readiness to undertake any mysterious
commissions that might call for the services of an “active,
intelligent young man, with a turn for the adventurous”: but the
supply of amateur adventurers was at the time well ahead of the
demand, and there was no response. In despair, he had betaken himself
to Paston Oatvile, and even his ill-wishers admitted that his game was
improving.
That Mr. Carmichael, the fourth member of the party, had been a don
you knew as soon as he opened his mouth. There was that precision in
his utterances, that benignity in his eye, that spontaneity in his
willingness to impart information, that no other profession breeds. A
perpetual fountain of interesting small-talk, he unnerved his audience
with a sense of intellectual repletion which was worse than boredom.
Not that he talked the “shop” of the learned: his subject had been
Greek archæology; his talk was of county families, of travels in the
Near East, of the processes by which fountain-pens are manufactured,
of county families again. He was over sixty—he, alone of the party,
was married, and lived in one of the bungalows with a colourless wife,
who seemed to have been withered by long exposure to the sirocco of
his conversation: at the moment she was absent, and he was lodging in
the dormy-house like the rest. It must be confessed that his
fellow-members shunned him, but he was useful upon occasion as a last
court of appeal on any matter of fact; it was he who could remember
what year it was the bull got loose on the links, and what ball the
Open Championship was won with three years back.
Marryatt (that was the clergyman, yes; I see you are a proper reader
for a detective-story) rose once more and took a good look at the
weather. The fog was lifting, but the rain still fell pitilessly. “I
shouldn’t wonder,” he said, “if we had some showers before nightfall.”
“It’s a curious thing,” said Carmichael, “that the early Basque poets
always speak of the night not as falling but as rising. I suppose they
had a right to look at it that way. Now, for myself———”
Marryatt, fortunately, knew him well enough to interrupt him. “It’s
the sort of afternoon,” he said darkly, “on which one wants to murder
somebody, just to relieve one’s feelings.”
“You would be wrong,” said Reeves. “Think of the footmarks you’d be
bound to leave behind you in mud like this. You would be caught in no
time.”
“Ah, you’ve been reading _The Mystery of the Green Thumb_. But tell
me, how many murderers have really been discovered by their
footprints? The bootmakers have conspired to make the human race
believe that there are only about half a dozen different sizes of
feet, and we all have to cram ourselves into horrible boots of one
uniform pattern, imported by the gross from America. What does Holmes
do next?”
“Well, you see,” put in Gordon, “the detectives in the book always
have the luck. The murderer generally has a wooden leg, and that
doesn’t take much tracing. The trouble in real life is the way
murderers go about unamputated. And then there’s the left-handed men,
how conveniently they come in! I tried detection once on an old pipe,
and I could show you from the way the side of it was charred that the
owner of it was right-handed. But there are so many right-handed
people.”
“In most cases,” said Carmichael, “it’s only nerves that make people
think they’re left-handed. A more extraordinary thing is the matter of
parting the hair. Everybody is predestined from birth to part his hair
on one particular side; but most of the people who ought to part their
hair on the right do it on the left instead, because that’s easier
when you’re right-handed.”
“I think you’re wrong in principle, Gordon,” said Reeves. “Everybody
in the world has his little peculiarities, which would give him away
to the eye of a trained detective. You, for example, are the most
normal specimen, if I may say so, of the human race. Yet I know which
of those whisky glasses on the mantelpiece is yours, though they’re
empty.”
“Well, which?” asked Gordon, interested.
“The one in the middle,” said Reeves. “It’s pushed farther away from
the edge: you, like the careful soul you are, instinctively took more
precaution against its being brushed off. Aren’t I right?”
“To tell the truth, I can’t for the life of me remember. But there,
you see, you’re talking of somebody you know. None of us are
murderers, at least, I hope not. If you were trying to detect a
murderer you’d never been introduced to, you wouldn’t know what to
look out for.”
“Try it on,” suggested Marryatt. “You know, the Holmes stunt, deducing
things from the bowler hat, and from Watson’s brother’s watch. Try
that umbrella over there, whatever it’s doing here; what will you
deduce from it?”
“I should deduce that it had been raining recently,” put in Gordon
with great seriousness.
“As a matter of fact,” said Reeves, turning the umbrella this way and
that, “an umbrella’s a very difficult thing to get any clues out of.”
“I’m glad of that,” said Carmichael, “because——”
“—only this one,” continued Reeves, ignoring him, “happens to be
rather interesting. Anybody could see that it’s pretty new, yet the
ferrule at the end of it is nearly worn through, which shows it’s been
used a lot. Inference; that it’s used by somebody who doesn’t keep his
umbrella for days like this, but uses it as a walking-stick. Therefore
it belongs to old Brotherhood; he’s the only man I know in this club
who always carries one.”
“You see,” said Carmichael, “that’s the sort of thing that happens in
real life. As I was just going to say, I brought in that umbrella
myself. I took it by mistake from a complete stranger in the Tube.”
Mordaunt Reeves laughed a little sourly. “Well,” he said, “the
principle holds, anyhow. Everything tells a story, if you are careful
not to theorize beyond your data.”
“I’m afraid,” said Gordon, “I must be one of Nature’s Watsons. I
prefer to leave things where they lie, and let people tell me the
story.”
“There you are wrong,” protested Reeves. “People can never tell you a
story without putting their own colour upon it—that is the difficulty
of getting evidence in real life. There, I grant you, the detective
stories are unreal: they always represent witnesses as giving the
facts with complete accuracy, and in language of the author’s own
choosing. Somebody bursts into the room, and says, ‘The body of a
well-dressed man in middle-life has been found four yards away from
the north end of the shrubbery. There are marks of violence about the
person of the deceased’—just like a reporter’s account of an inquest.
But in real life he would say, ‘Good God! A man’s shot himself on the
lawn’—leaping at once, you see, from observation to inference.”
“Journalism,” explained Carmichael, “makes havoc of all our detective
stories. What is journalism? It is the effort to make all the facts of
life correspond, whether they will or no, to about two hundred
ready-made phrases. Head-lines are especially destructive—you will
have noticed for yourselves how the modern head-line aspires to be a
series of nouns, with no other parts of speech in attendance. I mean,
the phrase, ‘She went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an
apple pie’ becomes ‘Apple-pie fraud cabbage-leaf hunt,’ and ‘What; no
soap! So he died’ becomes ‘Soap-shortage fatality sequel.’ Under this
treatment, all the nuances of atmosphere and of motive disappear; we
figure the truth by trying to make it fit into a formula.”
“I agree with you about inference,” said Marryatt, disregarding
Carmichael’s last remark—one always did disregard Carmichael’s last
remark. “But think how much of one’s knowledge of other people is
really inference. What do we really know about one another down here?
Fellow-passengers on the stream of life, that’s all we are. Take old
Brotherhood, whom you were mentioning just now. We know that he has
some sort of business in London, but we’ve no idea what. We know that
he comes down here every night in the week from Monday onwards, and
then from Saturday to Monday he disappears—how do you know what he
does with himself during the week-ends? Or take young Davenant down at
the Hatcheries; he turns up there every Saturday evening, and does his
two rounds on the Sunday, and then on Monday he’s off again into the
_Ewigkeit_. What do we really know about him?”
“I should have thought you knew all you wanted to about Brotherhood,”
chuckled Reeves. “Hasn’t he taken to disproving the existence of God
on Wednesday evenings on the village green?”
Marryatt flushed slightly. “After all,” he said, “what does that
amount to? You might as well say I know Davenant’s a Roman Catholic.
But all I know is that once in a way he goes over on a Sunday to
Paston Bridge—the priest there knows something about him, I suppose,
but he wouldn’t tell you.”
“I had a very extraordinary experience once,” said Carmichael, “in
Albania. I had to translate the confession of a dying man into French
for the sake of a priest who didn’t know the local language. The
priest told me afterwards I was bound not to disclose to anybody what
I’d heard.”
“He didn’t know you, anyhow, Carmichael,” suggested Reeves.
“As a matter of fact, I’ve never mentioned what he said to anybody,
though it was sufficiently curious.”
“It’s impossible,” resumed Reeves, “not to make inferences; the
mistake is to depend on them. In ordinary life, you have to take
risks; you have to sit down in the barber’s chair, although you know
it is just as easy for him to cut your throat as to shave you. But in
detection one should take no chances, give no one the benefit of the
doubt. Half of the undetected crimes in the world are due to our
reluctance to suspect anybody.”
“But surely,” urged Marryatt, “you would allow character to go for
something? I was a schoolmaster once, and while one knew the little
beasts were capable of almost anything, one did clear some people of
suspicion on mere character.”
“But there again,” argued Gordon, “you knew them very well.”
“Not really,” said Marryatt. “A perpetual war of mutual deception is
kept up between schoolmasters and schoolboys. One trusted, I think,
one’s unconscious impressions most.”
“If I were a detective,” persisted Reeves, “I would suspect my own
father or mother as soon as anybody else. I would follow up every
clue, blinding myself deliberately to the thought, where does this
point to?”
“Then you would be unreasonable,” said Gordon. “In the old days, when
the answers of sums used always to come out to an integral number—I
believe it’s all different now—one was wiser than that. If you could
see that the answer was going to involve two-thirds of a policeman,
you argued at once that you were on the wrong track; you started
again, and suspected your working.”
“But real life,” retorted Reeves, “doesn’t always work out to a simple
answer. And if the policeman who’s in charge of a case argues as
you’re arguing, he’s only himself to blame for it if he gets trisected
by the criminal before he’s finished.”
“At least you must respect the principle of _Cui bono_?”
“It’s extraordinary,” began Carmichael, “how many people make the old
mistake about the meaning of——”
“_Cui bono_ is the worst offender of the lot,” said Mordaunt Reeves
cheerfully. “Look at those two boys in America who murdered another
boy just to find out what it felt like.”
“But that was pathological.”
“And how many crimes aren’t pathological, if it comes to that?”
“I was on Holy Island once for a month,” said Carmichael, “and would
you believe it, there was a man there that was sick if he ever caught
sight of a dog? Sick, positively.”
“What do you think it really feels like,” asked Marryatt, “to have
murdered a man? I mean, murderers in general always seem to lose their
heads when the thing is actually done, and give themselves away
somehow. But one would have thought, if the thing is planned with
proper deliberation, one’s feeling would be that things were working
out according to plan, and the next thing was to get clear—above all
things, to see plenty of people, and to behave quite naturally in
company.”
“Why that?” asked Gordon.
“To establish your alibi. People are often careless about that.”
“By the way,” asked Carmichael, “did you bring a paper with you down
from London? I’m interested to see the verdict in that Stanesby case.
The young fellow is connected, I hear, with the Stanesbys of
Martington.”
“Afraid I left London at three, and that’s too early for anything but
betting tips. I say, you fellows, it’s stopped raining.”