Dorothy Sayers - Five Red Herrings

‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Mr. Saunders. ‘Quite so. You’re very well, I hope, Sergeant?’

‘You told him then,’ said Wimsey, ‘that Mr. Ferguson came in here about ten minutes to three.’

‘Did I? Oh, yes — I remember. Mr. Crisp called me in. You remember, Miss Madden? Yes. But I didn’t say that. Birkett said that — the young man in the show-room, don’t you know. Said the customer had been waiting ten minutes. Yes. I didn’t see the chappie when he came in, you know. I found him waiting when I got back from lunch. I was a little late that day, I think. Yes. Lunching with a customer. Business, and all that sort of thing. Yes. Mr. Crisp rather hauled me over the coals, I remember. Ha, ha!’

‘When exactly did ye come in, Mr. Saunders?’ asked the Inspector grimly.

‘Oh, well — must have been about three o’clock, I’m afraid. Yes. Half an hour late. Business, of course. Mr. Crisp—’

‘Wull ye no speak the truth, mon?’ said Inspector Macpherson, irritated.

‘Eh? Oh — well — as a matter of fact, I may have been a minute or two later. I–I rather avoided looking at the clock, I’m afraid. What time did I come in, Miss Madden?’

‘A quarter past three, Mr. Saunders,’ said Miss Madden concisely. ‘I remember the occasion perfectly.’

‘By jove, was it? Well, I thought it must have been somewhere about three or a little after. What a memory you’ve got, Miss Madden.’

Miss Madden smiled faintly.

‘There you are, Inspector,’ said Wimsey. ‘Difference between five minutes to and five minutes past. All the difference, isn’t it?’

‘Ye may have tae swear tae this in a court of law, Mr. Saunders,’ said the Inspector, sourly. ‘So I’ll trouble ye no tae forget it again.’

‘Oh, I say, really?’ said Mr. Saunders, in some alarm. ‘Look here, shall I have to say who I was lunching with? Because, as a matter of fact, it wasn’t exactly business. At least, it was private business.’

‘That will be your own concern, Mr. Saunders. Ye may like tae know that we’re investigatin’ a murder.’

‘Oh, I say ! Of course, I didn’t know that. Mr. Crisp just asked me when I came in. I said, about three — because it really was that, you know, more or less. Of course, if I’d known, I should have asked Miss Madden. She has such a wonderful memory for details.’

‘Ay,’ said the Inspector, ‘and I wad advise ye tae cultivate the same yersel’. Gude day tae ye.’

The investigators were shown out by Mr. Saunders, who burbled unconvincingly all down the passage.

‘It’s not much good questioning this fellow Birkett, I suppose,’ said Sir Maxwell. ‘He probably spoke in perfect good faith. He’d be ready to swear today that he’d kept you waiting, Wimsey.’

‘Probably. Well, now, we’ve got to be up at the Exhibition at four. Not much time. However, I noticed a jobbing printer’s on the way up here. I daresay we shall find what we want there.’

He led them at a quick pace along the street, and darted into a small printing-works.

‘I want to buy a few metal types,’ he said. ‘Rather like these. Must be this size, and as near in character as you can supply them.’ He produced a sheet of paper.

The foreman scratched his head.

‘That’ll be 5 point,’ he said. ‘The nearest thing to it wad be Clarendon caps. Ay, we can gi’e ye that, if ye wasn’t wantin’ a great weight o’t.’

‘Oh, dear, no. I only want five letters — S — M and L — A and D and a complete set of figures.’

‘Will monotype castings do ye?’

‘I’d rather have foundry-metal if you have it. I want to use them as punches for a small piece of leather-work.’

‘Verra gude.’ The Foreman went to a case of type, extracted the required letters and figures and wrapped them up in a screw of paper, mentioning a small price.

Wimsey paid for them and put the little parcel in his pocket.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘did you have a gentleman in here, asking for the same thing a fortnight ago?’

‘No, sir. I wad mind it weel eneugh. Na, na, it wad be a rather uncommon transaction. I havena been askit for sic a thing since I cam’ tae this business, an’ that’s twa year next January.’

‘Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. Thanks awfully. Good afternoon.’

‘Better get a trade directory, Inspector, and count out all the printers. And — yes — wait, — the people who sell book-binding materials. Ferguson must have got these — unless, of course, he brought them with him, which isn’t very likely.’

Dalziel departed on this errand, while the rest took a taxi and hurried away to the Exhibition, which they reached a few minutes before four. Here they dallied till half-past four, making a hasty tour of all the rooms, and noting one or two striking pictures in each.

‘There,’ said Wimsey, as they passed the turnstile again. ‘Now, if we were to meet any inquisitive friends on the doorway, we could persuade them that we had visited the whole show and used our brains. And now we had better make tracks for a quiet place. I suggest a hotel bedroom.’

LORD PETER WIMSEY

In a remote bedroom in one of Glasgow’s principal hotels, Wimsey unwrapped his little parcel of types, together with Ferguson’s safety-razor, and a small hammer, which he had purchased on the way.

Then, gathering his audience about him, he brought out from his pocket the outward half of his first-class ticket from Gatehouse to Glasgow.

‘Now, gentlemen,’ said he, ‘we come to the crucial point of our investigation.

‘If you had read that excellent work of Mr. Connington’s, to which I drew your attention, you would have found that it contained an account of how a gentleman forged a clip-mark on his railway ticket, by means of a pair of nail-scissors.

‘That was on an English line. Now, the Scottish railway authorities, possibly out of sheer tiresomeness, and possibly with the laudable idea of making the way of a ticket-forger hard, are not content with a simple triangular clip.

‘The other day I travelled — at great inconvenience to myself — from Gatehouse to Glasgow by the 9.8 a.m. train. I found that the brutal ticket-collectors actually inflicted three ferocious punches on my poor little half-ticket. The first was at Maxwell town, where they produced a horrible set of indented letters and numerals, thus: LMS 42 D. At Hurlford, they were content to take a large bite out of the ticket — not a simple triangular snip, but a disgusting thing like a squat figure I. Ferguson would probably have seen these marks, and having the artist’s eye and a remarkable visual memory, would no doubt be able to reproduce these things from memory. Personally, I took the precaution of drawing the mark left by the clipper. Here it is: — |. Then, at Mauchline, they went all cautious again, and disfigured the ticket with another cipher-code: LMS 23 A. Now, gentlemen, with your permission and these instruments, we will proceed to forge the punch-marks on this ticket.’

He took up the safety-razor, detached the blade, and, laying the ticket down on the marble-topped washstand, proceeded to cut the Hurlford clip-mark out of the pasteboard.

This done, he laid the ticket on the blotting-pad provided by the hotel, placed the type-metal figure 2 carefully just above the edge of the ticket, and delivered a smart tap with the hammer. The figure appeared, when the type was lifted, sharply incised on the face of the ticket, which, on being turned over, showed a thicker and blunter version of the figure in relief on the reverse.

‘Eh, mon!’ exclaimed Macpherson, ‘but ye’re ower clever tae be an honest mon.’

Wimsey added the figure 3 and an A, taking care to keep the feet of the letters parallel — a task easily accomplished by setting the beard of the type in line with the edge of the pasteboard. Then, with careful attention to spacing and uprightness, he punched in the letters LMS over the 23A. This completed the Mauchline punch-mark. In the third place he forged the LMS 42 Dfor the Maxwelltown mark, and laid his tools aside with a sigh of satisfaction.