Lord Dunsany - Two Bottles of Relish - The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories

He made one or two other suggestions, but Scotland Yard had been before him in every case. That’s really the crab of my story, if you’ll excuse the expression. You want a man who sets out to be a detective to take his magnifying glass and go down to the spot; to go to the spot before everything; and then to measure the footmarks and pick up the clues and find the knife that the police have overlooked. But Linley never even went near the place and he hadn’t got a magnifying glass, not as I ever saw, and Scotland Yard were before him every time.

In fact they had more clues than anybody could make head or tail of. Every kind of clue to show that he’d murdered the poor little girl; every kind of clue to show that he hadn’t disposed of the body; and yet the body wasn’t there. It wasn’t in South America either, and not much more likely in South Africa. And all the time, mind you, that enormous bunch of chopped larch wood, a clue that was staring everyone in the face and leading nowhere. No, we didn’t seem to want any more clues, and Linley never went near the place. The trouble was to deal with the clues we’d got. I was completely mystified; so was Scotland Yard; and Linley seemed to be getting no forwarder; and all the while the mystery was hanging on me. I mean, if it were not for the trifle I’d chanced to remember, and if it were not for one chance word I said to Linley, that mystery would have gone the way of all the other mysteries that men have made nothing of, a darkness, a little patch of night in history.

Well, the fact was Linley didn’t take much interest in it at first, but I was so absolutely sure that he could do it, that I kept him to the idea. ‘You can do chess problems,’ I said.

‘That’s ten times harder,’ he said sticking to his point.

‘Then why don’t you do this?’ I said.

‘Then go and take a look at the board for me,’ said Linley.

That was his way of talking. We’d been a fortnight together, and I knew it by now. He meant go down to the bungalow at Unge. I know you’ll say why didn’t he go himself, but the plain truth of it is that if he’d been tearing about the countryside he’d never have been thinking, whereas sitting there in his chair by the fire in our flat there was no limit to the ground he could cover, if you follow my meaning. So down I went by train next day, and got out at Unge station. And there were the North Downs rising up before me, somehow like music.

‘It’s up there, isn’t it?’ I said to the porter.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Up there by the lane; and mind to turn to your right when you get to the old yew-tree, a very big tree, you can’t mistake it, and then …’ and he told me the way so that I couldn’t go wrong. I found them all like that, very nice and helpful. You see it was Unge’s day at last; everyone had heard of Unge now; you could have got a letter there any time just then without putting the county or post-town; and this was what Unge had to show. I dare say if you tried to find Unge now …; well, anyway, they were making hay while the sun shone.

Well, there the hill was, going up into sunlight, going up like a song. You don’t want to hear about the Spring, and all the may rioting, and the colour that came down over everything later on in the day, and all those birds; but I thought, ‘What a nice place to bring a girl to.’ And then when I thought that he’d killed her there, well, I’m only a small man, as I said, but when I thought of her on that hill with all the birds singing, I said to myself, ‘Wouldn’t it be odd if it turned out to be me after all that got that man killed, if he did murder her.’ So I soon found my way up to the bungalow and began prying about, looking over the hedge into the garden. And I didn’t find much, and I found nothing at all that the police hadn’t found already, but there were those heaps of larch-logs staring me in the face and looking very queer.

I did a lot of thinking, leaning against the hedge, breathing the smell of the may, and looking over the top of it at the larch-logs, and the neat little bungalow the other side of the garden. Lots of theories I thought of; till I came to the best thought of all; and that was that if I left the thinking to Linley, with his Oxford-and-Cambridge education, and only brought him the facts, as he had told me, I should be doing more good in my way than if I tried to do any big thinking. I forgot to tell you that I had gone to Scotland Yard in the morning. Well, there wasn’t really much to tell. What they asked me was, what I wanted. And, not having an answer exactly ready, I didn’t find out very much from them. But it was quite different at Unge; everyone was most obliging; it was their day there, as I said. The constable let me go indoors, so long as I didn’t touch anything, and he gave me a look at the garden from the inside. And I saw the stumps of the ten larch-trees, and I noticed one thing that Linley said was very observant of me, not that it turned out to be any use, but any way I was doing my best; I noticed that the stumps had been all chopped anyhow. And from that I thought that the man that did it didn’t know much about chopping. The constable said that was a deduction. So then I said that the axe was blunt when he used it; and that certainly made the constable think, though he didn’t actually say I was right this time. Did I tell you that Steeger never went outdoors, except to the little garden to chop wood, ever since Nancy disappeared? I think I did. Well, it was perfectly true. They’d watched him night and day, one or another of them, and the Unge constable told me that himself. That limited things a good deal. The only thing I didn’t like about it was that I felt Linley ought to have found all that out instead of ordinary policemen, and I felt that he could have too. There’d have been romance in a story like that. And they’d never have done it if the news hadn’t gone round that the man was a vegetarian and only dealt at the greengrocers. Likely as not even that was only started out of pique by the butcher. It’s queer what little things may trip a man up. Best to keep straight is my motto. But perhaps I’m straying a bit away from my story. I should like to do that for ever; forget that it ever was; but I can’t.

Well, I picked up all sorts of information; clues I suppose I should call it in a story like this; though they none of them seemed to lead anywhere. For instance, I found out everything he ever bought at the village, I could even tell you the kind of salt he bought, quite plain with no phosphates in it, that they sometimes put in to make it tidy. And then he got ice from the fishmongers, and plenty of vegetables, as I said, from the greengrocer, Mergin and Sons. And I had a bit of a talk over it all with the constable. Slugger he said his name was. I wondered why he hadn’t come in and searched the place as soon as the girl was missing. ‘Well, you can’t do that,’ he said. ‘And besides, we didn’t suspect at once, not about the girl that is. We only suspected there was something wrong about him on account of him being a vegetarian. He stayed a good fortnight after the last that was seen of her. And then we slipped in like a knife. But, you see, no one had been enquiring about her, there was no warrant out.’

‘And what did you find,’ I asked Slugger, ‘when you went in?’

‘Just a big file,’ he said, ‘and the knife and the axe that he must have got to chop her up with.’

‘But he got the axe to chop trees with,’ I said.

‘Well, yes,’ he said, but rather grudgingly.

‘And what did he chop them for?’ I asked.

‘Well of course, my superiors has theories about that,’ he said, ‘that they mightn’t tell to everybody.’

You see, it was those logs that were beating them.