The Viaduct Murder

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

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 today. The house itself may be condemned to the scrapheap, 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 overpopulated 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 ballroom, 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 roughcast 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 marketplace around which all their activities centre—stands the dower-house of the Oatviles, the dormy-house of today. 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 clubhouse, 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. Today, it somehow strikes the eye as a byproduct 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 shortsightedness 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 archaeology; 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. Headlines are especially destructive—you will have noticed for yourselves how the modern headline 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 weekends? 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?”