Five Red Herrings Read online

  ‘Ay,’ said Dalziel, ‘ye may confidently assume that, my lord.’

  ‘Very well, then. There was, of course, the faint possibility that, after Campbell’s death, someone had come up and removed the tube, but we felt that to be too fantastic for consideration. Why should anybody steal just that one thing and nothing else? And then, there was the condition of the body, which suggested that death had occurred a good deal earlier than the amount of work on the picture would lead one to suppose. And by the way, doctor, I may as well relieve your mind and say at once that, in spite of Duncan’s able and ingenious special pleading, your estimate of the time of death was perfectly sound.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘Yes. Well, the question was, what had happened to the flake white? Taking all the appearances into consideration, I formed the opinion that (a) Campbell had been murdered, (b) the murderer had painted the picture, (c) he had for some reason taken the flake white away with him.

  ‘Now, why should he take it away? It would be the silliest possible thing for him to do, since its absence would instantly arouse suspicion. He must have taken it by mistake, and that meant that he must have automatically put it in the place where he was accustomed to put tubes of colour while painting. He hadn’t put it in any of the ordinary places – on the ground, or in a box, or in the satchel or on the tray attached to the easel. He must have bestowed it about his person somewhere, and a pocket was the likeliest place. So that from that moment I felt we ought to look about for a painter with the untidy habit of dropping paints into his pockets.’

  ‘You didn’t mention that,’ said Dalziel, reproachfully.

  ‘No, because I was afraid – forgive me – that if I had, you might possibly go and make inquiries about it, and if once the murderer had his attention drawn to this unfortunate habit of his, there would be an end of the habit and the inquiry. Besides, several painters might have the same habit. Or I might be entirely mistaken about the whole thing – it was a slender clue, and I might be straining it too far. I thought my best plan was to snoop about the studios and watch people at work and find out what their habits were. That was obviously a job which I, as a private person, could do better than any official. But I gave you the pointer, Dalziel, and you put it into your report. Anybody could have come to the same conclusion as I did. Why didn’t anybody?’

  ‘Never mind why we didn’t, Wimsey,’ said Sir Maxwell. ‘Go on with your story.’

  ‘The next thing,’ said Wimsey, ‘was – why all this elaborate fake with the picture? Why should a murderer hang round the place of the crime painting pictures? Obviously, to disguise the fact that Campbell had been killed at – well, whatever time he was killed. Say the previous night. That meant that the murderer hadn’t got a good alibi for the previous night or whenever it was. But if he wanted to make it look as though Campbell had been killed that morning, it meant that he must be preparing himself a cast-iron alibi for that particular morning. So I decided that I knew four things about the murderer already: (1) he was an artist, or he couldn’t have painted the picture, (2) he had a habit of putting paints in his pocket, (3) he had a weak alibi for the actual time of death, (4) he would have a good alibi for Tuesday morning.

  ‘Then came the discovery of the tar-marks on the car. That suggested that the alibi had somehow been worked out with the aid of a bicycle. But I couldn’t get farther than that, because I didn’t know when Campbell was killed, or when he was supposed to have started out for the Minnoch, or how long the picture would take to paint, or any details of that kind. But what I did know was that Campbell had been a quarrelsome kind of devil, and that at least six artists in the district had been going about shouting for his blood.

  ‘Now the confusing thing about this case was that of these six artists, five had disappeared. Of course it isn’t in the least unusual for five artists to be away from the district at the same time. There was the Exhibition at Glasgow, to which several people had gone, including Ferguson. There was fishing, which often takes people out at night – there were hundreds of perfectly legitimate things they might have been doing. But the fact remained that those five people were not available for inquiries. You can’t sit round and watch a man painting when you don’t know where he is. The only man I could get hold of at once was Strachan, and when I came to look into his case, it appeared that his alibi was anything but satisfactory, not only for the Monday night but for the Tuesday morning as well; to say nothing of his having a black eye and a generally dilapidated appearance.

  ‘So that was how the case stood then. Graham, vanished; Farren vanished; Waters vanished; Gowan gone to London; Ferguson, gone to Glasgow; Strachan, at home, but obviously telling lies.

  ‘Strachan, I may say, I almost absolved at once, though I thought it possible that he had some guilty knowledge of some kind. I was looking for a murderer with a good alibi, and Strachan’s was about as bad and clumsy as it could be. Graham, Farren and Waters had to wait; they might turn up with excellent alibis; I couldn’t tell. Only I had expected something more obvious and immediate. The two most suspicious people, from my point of view, were Ferguson and Gowan, because they had alibis supported by outside people. But if Gowan’s alibi was sound, it covered the night as well as the morning; therefore the man who best fulfilled all the conditions was Ferguson. He had an alibi of exactly the kind that I expected. It covered the morning only; it was watertight in every joint; and it was established by people like station-masters and bus-conductors, who could have no possible reason for lying about it. If Ferguson had really travelled by the 9.8 train from Gatehouse to Dumfries, he could not have painted the picture.

  ‘Well, then the rest of the people began to filter along. Graham turned up with no explanation at all, and he gave me a bad jolt; because Graham is the one man of the six who has, not only imagination, but the same kind of imagination as my own. I could see Graham working out that train of thought about the alibi and saying to himself that any alibi would be suspect, and that the biggest proof of innocence would be to have none. I believe that at that point I suspected Graham more than anybody else. He said he could imitate Campbell’s style of painting – went out of his way to demonstrate it, too. I had an awful feeling that we should never be able to pin Graham down to anything. His manner was perfect. He took exactly the right line about the thing. And he didn’t mean to commit himself until he knew what he had got to meet.

  ‘Then Ferguson came back, with plenty of witnesses to show that he had really been to Glasgow, and told us a story which gave us at last a few real times to go upon. I am sure that all the times he gave us were perfectly correct, by the way, and that he didn’t fall asleep or miss anything. I barged in on him and studied his method of painting and all that, and got him settled in my mind.

  ‘That was the day we began to get a line on that bicycle business at Ayr. Now, I don’t want to be rude to anybody, but I do think that bicycle ought to have been taken into account in any explanation of the crime. The whole affair was so extremely odd that it could hardly be an accident or a coincidence. It didn’t throw any light on the personality of the murderer, of course, because, though it was a Gatehouse bicycle, that merely meant that the crime had been worked from Gatehouse, which was overwhelmingly probable in any case. It was a great pity that that unfortunate porter at Girvan should have crocked up when he did. If he could have identified one of those photographs, he might have spared us a lot of trouble.

  ‘Thursday – what did I do on Thursday? Of course, yes – we got the story of the row on the Gatehouse-Kirkcudbright road, and the spanner and the black hair. We rather tripped up on that, Macpherson. If we’d been a bit quicker, we could have caught Gowan before he eloped and saved several railway-fares to London. It was my fault, because I was taken up with my painting idea, and went round to Bob Anderson’s to propose a sort of reconstruction up at the Minnoch. I was going to cart a lot of painters up there and set them to paint in Campbell’s manner and see how long it took them
. Graham and Strachan and Ferguson were there. They all agreed to try, except that Ferguson thought the idea wasn’t in very good taste. But the weather spolit that plan.

  ‘What happened then? Oh, yes. I went over to the Carrick shore and watched Strachan painting, and he started to knock me into the sea, but thought better of it. By that time it was clear enough that he was either concealing something or shielding somebody, and the probability was that he was mixed up in Farren’s disappearance. I’d seen him over at Mrs. Farren’s, you know, on the Tuesday night, when I was inspecting Waters’ studio and observing what a handy place the lane was for a car-park.

  ‘Saturday, I didn’t do much, but Waters came back and we got that remarkable story from Mrs. Smith-Lemesurier. I was still uncertain about Graham. It was far too stupid a story for him to put up, but, as Duncan pointed out, the lady might have lost her head and concocted it without reference to him.

  ‘On Sunday I bullied Mrs. Farren into telling me where to find her husband. I ran him to earth on Monday and had a look at his painting methods, just before the official sleuths came along. So now I had only three more of my painters to inspect. After that, the Chief Constable got Strachan’s story, but I knew all I needed to know about Strachan by that time.

  ‘My final job was to get hold of Graham and Waters and put them on to copying Campbell’s painting. That killed four birds with one stone. It told me how they both used their colours, it gave me the time-factor I wanted to make my theory complete and, as it happened, they gave me, in conversation, the information I wanted about Gowan. That was why, Inspector, I told you that I didn’t need to go and see Gowan.

  ‘Now what you are all panting to know is – what did these six people do with their colours?

  ‘Gowan, it appeared, was a fearfully spick and span fellow. He couldn’t paint without having everything just so. He had a place for everything and everything in its place. He was the last person in the world to put paints in his pockets. And besides, to tell you the truth, I feel sure that he couldn’t have produced that imitation of Campbell’s style. He is too set in his methods. Nor do I think he would have the brains to carry out the fake from first to last. All the clever part of his little disappearance was planned and executed by Alcock, who has the makings of a very fine schemer indeed.

  ‘Waters habitually chucks his paints into a satchel. Consequently, with Campbell’s satchel handy, he would naturally have chucked them into it. And though he boasted of being able to imitate Campbell, he was slow at copying him, and his imitation was not extraordinarily good. But yet it wasn’t bad enough to look like a deliberate attempt to do it badly. And neither he nor Graham looked in the least as though they had any unpleasant associations with the picture.

  ‘Graham – well, Graham is a very clever man. He knew straight away that the painting wasn’t Campbell’s. He didn’t exactly say so, in so many words, but he noticed differences in the style and remarked upon them. That might, of course, have been the culminating point in his scheme of over-reaching me, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t. He seemed genuinely puzzled and suspicious. He also said that when painting out of doors, he put his tubes either on the ground or in his hat, and Waters bore him out in this. Neither Graham nor Waters showed any tendency to drop paints into their pockets. I watched them for an hour and a half, without surprising so much as a half-checked movement.

  ‘Farren uses a sketching-box and is particular about putting each tube back in its place immediately after use. I can’t say what he would do when he hadn’t a box handy, but while I was at Mrs. Farren’s I inspected the pockets of his old painting-jacket, and found that they had no tubes in them and no marks of paint on the lining. Besides, I eliminated Farren the moment I found that he had no alibi for Tuesday morning. The whole point of the fake was to support an alibi. If it didn’t do that, it wasn’t worth doing.

  ‘Strachan lays his colours out on the tray of his easel, always in the same order, and he makes up his palette in a uniform order, too – the order of the spectrum. Now Campbell’s palette was not made up like that, and the tubes of paint were all in the satchel – except, of course, the flake white. While watching Strachan, I took the opportunity to abstract a tube of cobalt, but he missed it instantly when he came to pack up, though he was all of a dither at the time, on account of the things I’d been saying to him. He wasn’t the man to go off with an incriminating tube of flake white in his pocket.

  ‘And now we come to Ferguson. Ferguson always puts paints in his pocket; I saw him do it. Ferguson gets his colours from Roberson’s, but he had a pound tube of Winsor & Newton on his table; I saw and handled it. It was Ferguson’s mania for a particular kind of bluish shadow-tint that puzzled Jock Graham in the faked picture. Ferguson, and nobody else, faked that picture and established that alibi.

  ‘Wait a minute. There are one or two other points about Ferguson that I want to make. He is the one man with the alibi that it was the aim and object of the murderer to establish by means of the fake. He is known to have a remarkable visual memory for details. It was Ferguson who objected to the painting expedition to the Minnoch. And I take off my hat to Sir Maxwell Jamieson for affirming, in the face of all probability, that Ferguson was the man with the special knowledge to produce all the right appearances at the cottage to deceive Mrs. Green.’

  There was a short silence when Wimsey had finished this long speech, which he delivered with an unaccustomed sobriety of style, and then Sir Maxwell said:

  ‘That is all very well, Wimsey, and it sounds very convincing, but unless you can break down Ferguson’s alibi, it goes for nothing at all. We know that he – or somebody – went from Gatehouse to Dumfries with the 9.8 and on to Glasgow. The ticket was clipped at three points on the journey, and given up at Glasgow. And besides, Ferguson was seen at Glasgow by those magneto people, and by Miss Selby and Miss Cochran. Are you suggesting that he had an accomplice to impersonate him, or what’

  ‘No. He hadn’t an accomplice. But he was a student of detective literature. Now, I’ll tell you what I propose to do, with your permission. Tomorrow is Tuesday again, and we shall find all the trains running as they did on the morning of the alibi. We will go down to the cottage tonight and reconstruct the whole course of events from beginning to end. I will undertake to show you exactly how the thing was worked. If I break down at any point, then my theory breaks down. But if I get through, I will not only prove that the thing is possible but also that it was done that way.’

  ‘Ye canna say fairer than that,’ said Inspector Macpherson.

  ‘The only thing is,’ said Wimsey, ‘that we must get Ferguson out of the way. If he sees what we’re doing, he’ll bolt.’

  ‘Let him,’ said Macpherson, grimly. ‘If he bolts, we’ll ken fine that he’s guilty.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Wimsey. ‘Now, look here, we shall want a smallish, heavyish man to be Campbell. All you police blokes are too big. I’m afraid it will have to be you, Sir Maxwell.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said that stout soldier, gamely, ‘provided you stop short at throwing me into the burn.’

  ‘I won’t do that, but you’ll have to do some very uncomfortable motoring, I’m afraid. Then we shall want two observers, one to stay with the corpse and the other to keep an eye on me. They will get a lot of strenuous exercise. How about you, Fiscal?’

  ‘No, no,’ said that gentleman, ‘I’m over old for traipsing about the country.’

  ‘Then it had better be Inspector Macpherson and the Sergeant. You can come as a passenger, Fiscal, if you like. Then we shall want a bicycle, since the real bicycle is still patiently sitting at Euston, waiting for somebody to be fool enough to claim it; eggs and bacon for everybody, and an extra car to carry the observers.’

  The Inspector undertook to procure all the necessary commodities.

  ‘Ross and Duncan,’ he added, ‘can watch Ferguson. Ye understand. Whatever place he goes, ye’ll shadow him, an’ if he tries tae bolt, ye’ll arrest him.’

>   ‘That’s the spirit,’ said Wimsey. ‘Sir Maxwell, you will start out from Kirkcudbright after the pubs close, and you’ll be waiting at the S-bend at 9.45. You, Macpherson, can take the observation car and play Gowan’s part in the business, but instead of returning to Kirkcudbright, you will follow the Chief Constable down to Gatehouse, so as to be ready to act Strachan’s part when the time comes. You, Dalziel, will cling to me and watch me like a cat watching a mouse-hole. You, Fiscal, will do as you like. And we’ll all start by having a very good dinner, for we’ve got a strenuous bit of work before us.’

  LORD PETER WIMSEY

  ‘Hullo!’ said Ferguson.

  ‘Hullo!’ said Wimsey. ‘This is the Procurator-Fiscal and this is Sergeant Dalziel of Newton-Stewart, whom I fancy you’ve met before. We are making a little experiment in connection with Campbell’s death and we want to use your house, if we may. It’s a good place to observe from, don’t you know?’

  ‘I trust we will not be putting you out, Mr. Ferguson,’ added the Fiscal, courteously.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Ferguson. ‘Come in. What exactly do you want to do?’

  ‘We are going to reconstruct the events of Monday night,’ said Wimsey, ‘and we want you to tell us if we go wrong at any point.’

  ‘Oh, certainly, with pleasure. When does the show start?’

  Wimsey looked at his watch.

  ‘Eight o’clock. It ought to be starting now. Will you do Farren, Dalziel, or shall I? You’d better, because then I can stay here under the Fiscal’s eye.’

  ‘Verra gude,’ said Dalziel, and departed.

  ‘Where were you sitting, Ferguson, when Farren arrived?’