Five Red Herrings Read online

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Macpherson, with a dissatisfied air. ‘It’s possible, I wadna go farther than that.’

  ‘By the way,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘on your theory, Dalziel, how do you account for Strachan’s hat and the tale he told about meeting Farren up at Falbae? Because, if your version is correct, that must have been pure invention.’

  ‘I account for’t this way,’ said Dalziel. ‘I think it’s a fact that Mr. Strachan searched for Farren at Falbae as he said, an’ didna find hide nor hair on him. An’ it may verra weel be that he tummel’t intae the mine as he says he did. But I think that, no findin’ him, he was feart Farren had been up tae mischief, an’ when he heard o’ the findin’ o’ Campbell’s boady, he juist added a wee word or twa tae his story, tae gie Farren some kind of an alibi. ’Deed an’ I’m thinkin’ ’tis gude proof o’ my theory that Strachan still evidently suspects Farren. Yet ken fine yersel’, Sir Maxwell, that he was awfu’ saircumspect in tellin’ ye his tale and wadna ha’ tell’t ye a single word o’ Farren’s note if ye hadna persuadit him ye kenned the truth a’ready.’

  ‘Ay,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘but I had my own notion about that.’

  ‘Well, let’s hear your notion, Sir Maxwell,’ said the Fiscal.

  ‘I was wishful,’ said Sir Maxwell, ‘to let the police have their say first but perhaps my idea does come in better at this point. Of course, the very first thing that struck me was the obvious collusion between Farren and Strachan to conceal something, but I looked at it in rather a different way. In my opinion, it was Strachan that had the guilty knowledge, and his difficulty was to protect himself without implicating Farren too much. Farren, by his behaviour and his threats and his disappearance, provided an almost perfect screen for Strachan, and it is, I think, very much to Strachan’s credit that he was so unwilling to make use of it.

  ‘Now, the weak point of your story, Dalziel, if I may say so, seems to me to occur at the moment of the murder itself. I simply cannot believe that, if it took place as you say at the cottage, between midnight and morning, it could have done so without disturbing Ferguson. Campbell was a powerful man, and, unless he was battered to death in his sleep, there would have been a noise and a struggle. Given the characters of all the people concerned, I cannot bring myself to believe that this was a case of a midnight assassin, creeping stealthily up to Campbell’s bedroom and felling him with one blow, before he had time to cry out. It is, in particular, exceedingly unlike what one might expect from Farren. On the other hand, if there was a noisy fight, I cannot understand why Ferguson heard nothing of it. It was August, the windows would be wide open, and, in any case, besides the actual noise of the quarrel, there would be a great deal of going to and fro in the night, taking the corpse out to the car and so on, that Ferguson could scarcely have failed to hear.

  ‘My theory is this. I think Farren’s story is true. It is too absurd and whimsical a story not to be true, and all Farren’s alleged actions are exactly the sort of daft thing Farren would do. I feel sure that Farren isn’t the man to plan out an elaborate fake like the planting of the body and the painting of the picture. The man who did that was perfectly cool and unemotional, and he would have known a great deal better than to go and lose himself in that suspicious way immediately afterwards. No. Depend upon it, the man who committed the crime would take the very first opportunity of reappearing in his usual haunts.

  ‘The way I see it is this. Strachan got that note from Farren and went down to the cottage as he said. When he got there, one of two things happened, and I am not perfectly sure which. I think Campbell opened the door to him and I think that he went in and had an interview with Campbell which ended in a violent quarrel and struggle. I think Ferguson was awakened by the noise, and came down just at the moment when Strachan had knocked Campbell down and killed him. Or possibly he arrived to find Strachan and Campbell fighting together, and then himself struck the blow which finished Campbell. There is the third possibility that the situation was reversed, and that Strachan came in to find Campbell already dead and Ferguson standing over him red-handed. I think that is rather less likely, for a reason I’ll explain later.

  ‘In any case, I’m sure we have this situation – the two men at the cottage with Campbell’s dead body and one at least of them guilty of killing him. Now, what would they do next? It is quite conceivable that, if only one of them had a hand in it, the other should at first threaten to inform the police, but there might be difficulties about that. Both men were well known to have quarrelled previously with Campbell, and the accused man might very well threaten to bring a counter-accusation. In any case, I fancy they realised that they were both of them in an exceedingly awkward position, and decided to help each other out if possible.

  ‘Which of the two had the idea of faking the accident I don’t know, of course, but I should imagine it would be Strachan. He is a man of particularly quick and keen intellect – just the sort that can think well ahead and foresee the consequences of his actions. The first bold outline of the idea would probably be his, but Ferguson no doubt helped, with his remarkable memory for details.

  ‘They would hope, naturally, that the whole thing would be accepted as pure accident; but they would remember that, if once a murder was suspected, they would need alibis to cover the whole period from midnight to the following mid-day. Obviously, they couldn’t both have alibis for the whole period, but they might do equally well by dividing the time. Eventually they decided that Strachan was to establish the alibi for the night hours, while Ferguson did everything necessary in connection with the body, and that Ferguson would then establish his alibi for the next morning, while Strachan painted the picture.’

  The Chief Constable paused and looked round to see how his audience were taking this. Encouraged by a little hum of appreciative surprise, he took up his tale again.

  ‘The reason why they worked it that way is, I think, that Ferguson had already announced his intention of going to Glasgow in the morning, and that any sudden change of plan might appear odd. They now had to think of some alibi which Strachan could reasonably put forward at that hour of the night, and the best thing they could think of was that he should carry out his original intention of going after Farren.’

  ‘But,’ interposed the Fiscal, ‘was not that a very difficult and uncertain plan on which to rely? It was a hundred to one against his meeting Farren. Would it not have been simpler to knock up some person with a suitable story? He could, for instance, have communicated to somebody his fears about Farren, and even taken that person with him as a witness to his alibi.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Sir Maxwell. ‘That point occurred to me also, but when I came to think the matter over, I saw that Strachan’s plan was about the best he could have adopted in the circumstances. For one thing, I believe that it would have been awkward for him to present himself in public at that moment. I think that he had already received that blow in the eye which he afterwards accounted for in another manner. That is why I said I felt pretty sure that Strachan took part in the struggle with Campbell, even though he may not have struck the fatal blow himself. Moreover, suppose he did knock somebody up to inquire about Farren, and suppose that somebody kindly offered to accompany him in his search? He would then, as the Fiscal truly says, have an unimpeachable witness to his alibi – certainly he would. But what if he could not get rid of the witness in time to do the very important job he had to do the next morning? What reason could he possibly give for abandoning his search for Farren and rushing away to Newton-Stewart? And how could he prevent people from knowing where he was going, if once he got a hue-and-cry started? Whatever happened, he had to get up to the Minnoch early the next morning, and he had to do it in secret.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t think his plan turned out as he intended. Indeed, it went very near to miscarrying altogether. I feel sure his original intention was to find Farren and bring him home – either to Kirkcudbright or to his own house at Gate
house. He could then have explained his black eye as being due to a fall sustained in his search at Falbae.’

  ‘But,’ objected Wimsey, who had been following all this argument with a keenness which his half-drooped eyelids scarcely veiled, ‘he’d still have to trundle off to the Minnoch next morning, wouldn’t he, old thing?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sir Maxwell, ‘so he would. But if he had dropped Farren at Kirkcudbright, he could easily have driven straight away again from there. He would hardly be expected to stay and make a third in the conjugal reunion. Then he could have gone off where he liked – perhaps leaving some sort of reassuring message for Mrs. Strachan. Or similarly, if he had taken Farren to Gatehouse, he could then have gone off for the ostensible purpose of reassuring Mrs. Farren about her husband. When he was once away, he could always be detained somewhere, by engine-trouble or what not. I see no great difficulty about that.’

  ‘All right,’ said Wimsey. ‘I pass that. Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.’

  ‘Well then, Strachan drove off in search of Farren, leaving Ferguson to pack the body up and do all the necessary things about the house. And by the way, I may as well say at this point that I don’t think any of you have paid sufficient attention to these things that were done about the house. The man who did them must have known a great deal about Campbell’s manner of living. He must have known exactly when to expect Mrs. Green, for example, and the way Campbell behaved when at home – whether he was tidy or untidy, for instance, and what sort of breakfast he usually had, and all that kind of thing. Otherwise, Mrs. Green would have noticed that something out of the ordinary had happened. Now, how could Farren or Waters or Gowan or Graham be aware of all these domestic details? The man who would know them was Ferguson, who was his next door neighbour and employed the same daily woman. He would be the one person who might habitually see Campbell having breakfast and puttering about the house; and what he didn’t know from his own observation he’d be sure to get from Mrs. Green in the course of her daily gossip.’

  ‘That’s a damned good point, Chief,’ said Wimsey, with the detached air of an Eton boy applauding a good stroke by a Harrow captain. ‘Damned good. Of course. Mrs. Green would be full of information. “Och. Mr. Campbell’s an awfu’ mon wi’ his pyjammers. Yesterday he was leavin’ them in the coal-hole an’ them only jist back fra’ the laundry. An’ today I’m findin’ them in the stoojo an’ him usin’ them for a pentin’-rag.” One learns a lot about one’s neighbours by listening to what is called kitchen-talk.’

  ‘Ay, that’s so,’ said Macpherson, a little doubtfully.

  Sir Maxwell smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘when I came to think the matter over, that struck me very forcibly. But to go on with Strachan. There’s no doubt he did find Farren, and there, I admit, he was rather lucky, though perhaps the chances against his doing so were not quite a hundred to one. After all, he had an extremely good idea where Farren was likely to be found, and he knew the ground about Falbae pretty well.’

  ‘Ay, that’s so,’ said Dalziel, ‘but whit wad he ha’ done, sir, if Farren really had throwed himsel’ doon the mine?’

  ‘That would have been rather unfortunate for him, I admit, said the Chief Constable. ‘In that case, he would have had to forgo his alibi for the early morning. All he could have done would be to leave some object or objects at Falbae to show that he had been there – his hat, for example, or his overcoat – and carry out his painting job at the Minnoch as early as possible, returning later to give the alarm and start the search for Farren. He could explain that he had been searching in some other place in the interim. It wouldn’t have been so good, but it would have been fairly good, especially as the subsequent discovery of Farren’s body would have been a very good witness to the truth of his story. However, he did find Farren, so we need not bother about that.

  ‘Unhappily, however, the plan came rather unstuck at this point. Farren, instead of coming quietly, escaped, and Strachan tumbled into a mine. This very nearly prevented Strachan from carrying out his part of the plot at all. He did fall down, he did have a job to extricate himself – though it didn’t take him quite as long as he said it did – and that was why he was so late in getting up to the Minnoch. If his plan had worked out properly, he no doubt hoped to be back with Farren at, say, 3 o’clock in the morning, and then go straight on to pick up the car and the body where Ferguson had left them ready for him.’

  ‘And where would that be?’ asked the Fiscal.

  ‘I can’t say exactly, but the idea would be for Ferguson to drive Campbell’s car up to some suitable spot – say by the old road through Gatehouse Station to Creetown – and leave it there to be picked up and taken on by Strachan. Ferguson would then return on a bicycle—’

  ‘What bicycle?’ said Wimsey.

  ‘Any bicycle,’ retorted the Chief Constable, ‘except, of course, the Anwoth Hotel bicycle that we’ve heard so much about. It’s not difficult to borrow bicycles in these parts, and he would have had plenty of time to bring it back and leave it where he found it. Ferguson would be back, say, at 7 o’clock, in good time to eat his own breakfast and catch the omnibus for Gatehouse Station.’

  ‘He must have been full of breakfast by that time,’ observed the Fiscal, ‘having already eaten Campbell’s.’

  ‘My dear man,’ said the Chief Constable, rather irritably, ‘if you had committed a murder and were trying to get away with it, you wouldn’t let a trifle like a second breakfast stand in your way.’

  ‘If I had committed a murder,’ replied the Fiscal, ‘I would feel no appetite even for one breakfast.’

  The Chief Constable restrained any expression of feeling at this frivolous comment. Macpherson, who had been jotting words and figures in his notebook, struck in at this point.

  ‘Then I take it, sir, this’ll be your time-table for the crime.’

  Case against Ferguson and Strachan

  Monday.

  9.15 p.m.

  Farren leaves note at Strachan’s house.

  10.20 p.m.

  Campbell returns home after encounter with Gowan.

  12 midnight or thereabouts

  Strachan returns home and finds note.

  Tuesday.

  12.10 a.m.

  (say). Strachan goes to Campbell’s cottage; is joined by Ferguson. Murder is committed.

  12.10–12.45

  (say). Plan of fake accident evolved. Strachan starts for Falbae, taking Campbell’s hat and cloak, painting materials, etc., in car.

  2–3 a.m.

  During this period Strachan and Farren meet and Farren escapes.

  3.30 a.m.

  (say). Strachan falls down mine.

  4 a.m.

  (say). Ferguson arrives at some spot on old road from Gatehouse Station to Creetown, with Campbell’s car containing body and bicycle. Leaves car hidden.

  5–6 a.m.

  Ferguson returns on bicycle to Gatehouse by old road.

  9 a.m.

  Strachan extricates himself from mine and finds his car.

  9.8 a.m.

  Ferguson takes the train to Dumfries.

  9.20 a.m.

  Strachan arrives at rendezvous transfers himself to Campbell’s car. Hides own car. Disguises himself.

  9.35 a.m.

  Strachan disguised as Campbell seen by workman passing turning to New Galloway.

  10 a.m.

  Strachan arrives at Minnoch. Plants body and paints picture.

  11.15 a.m.

  Strachan finishes picture.

  Here Macpherson paused.

  ‘How will Strachan get back tae his car, sir? ’Tis fourteen mile gude. He culdna du’t on his twa feet?’

  ‘Farren’s bicycle,’ replied the Chief Constable, promptly. ‘You should have made him pick that up at Falbae. Of course, if his original plan hadn’t gone wrong, he would either have borrowed another bicycle or had time to go on foot, but under the circumstances, with Farren’s machine lying ready to hand, he would take a
dvantage of it.’

  ‘Ay, sir; but ye have an answer tae everything.’ Macpherson shook his head soberly and returned to his time-table.

  12.45 p.m.

  Strachan returns on Farren’s bicycle to Creetown; abandons bicycle. Transfers to own car.

  1.15 p.m.

  Strachan returns to Gatehouse by Skyre Burn road.

  ‘That,’ said the Fiscal, who had been checking this time-table with the Chief Constable’s report of his interview with Strachan, ‘agrees very well with Strachan’s statement to you.’

  ‘It does’ replied Sir Maxwell ‘and what is still more important, it agrees with the facts. We have found a man who distinctly remembers seeing Strachan passing along the Skyre Burn road between 1 o’clock and 1.20. Moreover, we have traced his telephone-call to the McClellan Arms, and it was put through at 1.18 precisely.’

  ‘You realise,’ said Wimsey, ‘that you’ve only allowed him an hour and a quarter for painting that picture. I had two of the slickest men in the district working on it, and the quicker painter of the two couldn’t get the result under an hour and a half.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said the Chief Constable, grimly, ‘but he wasn’t painting for his life, you know.’

  ‘I wad like tae be sairtain o’ that,’ said a voice. Everybody was surprised. P.C. Duncan had sat so silent that they had almost forgotten his existence.

  ‘Is that so?’ said the Chief Constable. ‘Well, Duncan, you’re here to give us your opinion. Suppose we have it now.’