Margot Bennett - The Man Who Didn't Fly

Lewis handed him an ash-tray.

“We’ve heard rumours about people who haven’t enough money,” he said heavily.

Murray stubbed out the cigarette and lit another.

Inspector Lewis watched him carefully, an old, knowing badger, peering from his sett before emerging.

“Your friend Harry had been in Australia. Had he ever been in South Africa?”

“I don’t know everything about Harry,” Murray protested. “But if he ever landed in South Africa they probably bounced him out again. Harry would never be tactful enough for a place like that. He’d think of something to annoy, like opening a black-and-white matrimonial agency.”

“It’s not important.”

“Then I’ll proceed. When Harry left us he’d been writing some rather good verse – sentimental savagery about the middle-classes. Did you ever read one beginning: April’s always been the month for worry; Bills hissing through the letterbox like snakes?”

“No,” said Sergeant Young. “No, I don’t remember that.”

“He wrote a few like that. They were good, so I made the mistake of paying him in advance for some more. Well – I don’t suppose you’ve ever been an editor,” he said, looking thoughtfully at the inspector. “If you ever take it up, let me give you some advice. Don’t pay in advance. Because Harry, having the money, really didn’t have any inducement to do the work. It wasn’t very much money, but he knew that if he did finish his sequence of odes to the bourgeoisie, he wouldn’t get any more, so he thought he’d write something else instead. So, just when he was looking for an emotion to recall at boiling point, he met someone in a pub – a very amusing man, who’d been in and out of jail half-a-dozen times. So Harry thought: Why not be Franqois Villon?”

Inspector Lewis’s lower lip began to project like a railway signal.

“Who was this amusing man?” he asked.

“Actually, I’ve rather forgotten his name,” Murray said.

“Frangois Villon was a French poet, sir. He became a member of the criminal classes and some of his poetry was written from their standpoint,” Sergeant Young muttered.

“Anyway, around then I thought it was my duty as editor to keep tapping Harry’s shoulder, saying, What about those verses we’ve paid for? But Harry had sold a couple of poems, about psychology I think, to an American magazine that paid in genuine unforged dollars, so he had drinking money. We had some pretty hideous nights, I can tell you.”

“Where?”

“I’ve rather forgotten the names of the pubs. I was at a loss most of the time. Harry would point out a character and say: Would you like to know what he brought down the ladder last night? And I would say No, really no. Then we’d talk to the ladder-man, and all I could think of saying would be: Have you been stealing anything interesting recently? So I had to shut up and have another beer instead. Harry mixed in and I couldn’t. My analysis is that they liked him because he was – innocent. He wasn’t the kind of man who could possibly have been a policeman.”

Murray stopped and looked at the others anxiously. “Am I giving you some kind of idea?” he asked.

“Go on, please,” Inspector Lewis said.

“He wasn’t wasting his time,” Murray said defensively. “He picked up a lot of good stories. There was a girl, I think she was called Lily, who was staggering about with a case full of stolen watches: police whistles and burglar alarms going off like foghorns, and she stopped a policeman and told him her husband had thrown her out and could he direct her to a hostel, and he held up the traffic and took her across the road and saw her on to the right bus. Amusing, don’t you think?”

“Very.”

“Then there were a couple of sinister characters Harry told me had once been the reigning cracksmen of England. Go anywhere, steal anything. About two years ago they made a mammoth haul. Was there something called the Sackford Diamonds?” He looked up enquiringly.

Lewis nodded. “In June, two years ago.”

“Anyway, three of them planned that, three of them carried it out, and two of them were still in the house when the third man cleared off with the lot. They’ve been looking for him ever since. He’s well known to a lot of the boys. They say he had exquisite manners, perhaps not in those very words. And every night at closing time one of the other two brings out a photograph and pushes it under your nose. Or so Harry said. It was never pushed under mine. They offer a reward for information about him, just like the police. The point of the story is they’ve never stolen anything since. They can’t work alone, and they don’t trust each other or anyone else either. Their lives are ruined, Harry said.”

“I suppose you can’t exactly remember their names either?”

“I was never introduced,” Murray said firmly. “I’d better come to the point. After a few nights, Harry turned up and said: The boys don’t like you. They think you look like a plainclothes man.’ I was pretty shaken, as anyone might be.”

He looked appealingly at the inspector, who stared back with enormous detachment, as though he was studying him through plate glass.

“Actually, I’d already suspected I was being a social failure. I didn’t much fancy having my face smashed in with a bicycle chain. So I dropped out.”

“But Harry went on?”

“Yes. I didn’t see him again for a couple of weeks, then he told me, in strict confidence, and I’m quite aware I’m betraying him, I feel like a louse, that he’d been asked to go out on a job with the boys. He said What if he was caught? He could do better than the ballad of Reading Gaol anyway. It was one of those railway mailbag things, but he wouldn’t tell me what or when. I was very unhappy about the whole thing.”

“You were unhappy,” the inspector repeated with a different inflexion. “But you did nothing?”

“I didn’t know the train – or even the date. I didn’t know who the boys were. I could have rung Scotland Yard and said someone’s thinking of robbing a mail train, soon. They’d know that already. Somebody’s always thinking of robbing a mail train.”

“You could have reported the activities of your friend Harry.”

“That would have been going a bit far, wouldn’t it?”

“So you’re not opposed to robbery if it’s conducted by your friends?”

“I knew this interview wasn’t going to turn out well,” Murray said. “But you can put away the thumb-screws. I haven’t connived at any crime. I knew Harry well enough to know he could never finish anything. He didn’t take part in any robbery. He missed the train.”

“Intentionally?”

“It was just the way he was. He was a man who was always rushing into situations and then drifting away from them. He wasn’t reliable, in any way. I don’t know if he meant to miss the train. But he did. Then something happened.”

“Yes?”

“The robbery was a flop. Someone informed. There were to be four men in it as well as Harry. And three of them were caught.”

“And Harry missed the train?” Lewis commented. “This would be about five weeks ago?”

Murray nodded. “About that. I saw Harry the next day. He said his failure to catch the train might be misinterpreted. He said he didn’t want to be Frangois Villon any more, and crooks were tedious company. He said he was afraid they might be tedious enough to put him in a sack and drop him over London Bridge. He said all he wanted was a quiet place where he could write.”

“But not Reading Gaol?” Sergeant Young said.

“No.”

“Why have you come here with this story, Mr Murray?”

“Naturally when I heard about this disappearing passenger I assumed Harry had had a mortal interview with one of the boys.”