“You’ll have to take it from the prosecuting counsel in the Old Bailey, so you might as well have some practice in getting used to it. If you saw The Golden Cavaliers last night, as you claimed, you must have had the TV set balanced on the handle-bars of your scooter. The police constable who saw you passing through Hailem late last night made no mention of a TV set.”
“I assure you, Cavell, I haven’t the faintest idea—–”
“You make me ill,” I said disgustedly. “Lies I can forgive but stupidity, in a man of your calibre, no.” I looked at Mary. “About this play, The Golden Cavaliers!”
She lifted her shoulders, in discomfort and distress. “All TV broadcasts in southern England were badly affected by electrical disturbances last night. There were three breakdowns in the play and it didn’t finish until twenty minutes to twelve.”
“You must have a very special TV set indeed,” I said to Hartnell. I crossed to a magazine stand and picked up a copy of the Radio Times, but before I could open it Hartnell’s wife spoke, a tremor in her voice.
“You needn’t bother, Mr. Cavell. Last night’s play was a repeat of Sunday afternoon’s. We saw the play on Sunday.” She turned to her husband. “Come on, Tom, you’ll only make it worse for yourself.”
Hartnell stared miserably at her, turned away, slumped down in a chair and drained his glass in a couple of gulps. He didn’t offer me any but I didn’t add lack of hospitality to his list of faults, maybe the time wasn’t right. He said, “I was out last night. I left here just after ten-thirty. I had a phone call from a man asking me to meet him in Alfringham.”
“Who was the man?”
“It doesn’t matter. I didn’t see him — he wasn’t there when I arrived.”
“It wouldn’t have been our old pal Ten-per-cent Tuffnell of Tuffnell and Hanbury, Consultants-at-Law?”
He stared at me. “Tuffnell — do you know Tuffnell?”
“The ancient legal firm of Tuffnell and Hanbury is known to the police of a dozen counties. They style themselves ‘ Consultants-at-Law.’ Anybody can call themselves ‘ Consultants-at-Law.’ There’s no such thing so the bona-fide legal eagles can’t take any action against them. Tuffnell’s only knowledge of law comes from the fairly frequent occasions on which he had been hauled before the Assize judges, usually on charges of bribery and corruption. They’re one of the biggest money-lending firms in the country and by all odds the most ruthless.”
“But how — how did you guess—–?”
“No guess that it was Tuffnell. A certainty. Only a man with a powerful hold over you could have got you out at that time of night and Tuffnell has that hold. He not only holds the mortgage on your house but also your note of hand for another £500.”
“Who told you that?” Hartnell whispered.
“No one. I found out for myself. You don’t think you’re employed in the laboratory with the highest security rating in Britain without our knowing everything about you. We know more about your own past than you know yourself. That’s the literal truth. Tuffnell it was, en?”
Hartnell nodded. “He told me he wanted to see me at eleven sharp. I protested, naturally, but he said that unless I did what I was told he’d not only foreclose on the mortgage but he’d have me in the bankruptcy court for that five hundred pounds.”
I shook my head. “You scientists are all the same. Outside the four walls of your lab you ought to be locked up. A man who lends you money does so at his own risk and has no legal recourse. So he wasn’t there?”
“No. I waited a quarter of an hour, then went to his house — a whacking great mansion with tennis courts, swimming pool and what have you,” Hartnell said bitterly. “I thought he might have made a mistake about the meeting place. He wasn’t there. There was nobody there. I went back to the Alfringham office and waited a little longer then came home. About midnight, it was.”
“Anybody see you? You see anybody? Anybody who can vouch for your story.”
“Nobody. Nobody at all. It was late at night and the roads were deserted — it was bitterly cold.” He paused, then brightened. “That policeman — he saw me.” His voice seemed to falter on the last words.
“If he saw you in Hailem you could equally well have turned off for Mordon after leaving it.” I sighed. “Besides, there was no policeman. You’re not the only one who tells lies. So you see the spot you’re in, Hartnell? A phone call for which we have only your word — no trace of the man alleged to have made it. Sixteen miles on your scooter, including a wait in a normally busy little town — and not a living soul saw you. Finally, you’re deeply and desperately in debt — so desperate that you would be willing to do anything. Even break into Mordon, if the financial inducements were high enough.”
He was silent for a moment, then pushed himself wearily to his feet. “I’m completely innocent, Cavell. But I see how it is — and I’m not all that a fool. So I’m going to be — what do you call it — detained in custody?”
I said, “What do you think, Mrs. Hartnell?”
She gave me a troubled half-smile and said hesitantly, “I don’t think so. I — well, I don’t know how a police officer talks to a man he’s about to arrest for murder, but you don’t talk the way I should imagine they do.”
I said dryly, “Maybe you should be working in number one lab instead of your husband. As an alibi, Hartnell, your story is too ridiculously feeble for words. Nobody in their right minds would believe it for an instant, which means maybe that I’m not in my right mind. I believe it.”
Hartnell exhaled a long sigh of relief, but his wife said with a strange mixture of hesitancy and shrewdness, “It could be a trap. You could think Tom guilty and be lulling him into—–”
“Mrs. Hartnell,” I said. “With respects, you are abysmally ignorant of the facts of life as they appertain to the wilds of
Wiltshire. Your husband may think no one saw him, but I can assure you that the way between here and Alfringham is alive with people between 10.30 and 11 p.m. — courting couples, gentlemen between pubs and homes upending their last bottles to prepare themselves for wifely wrath, old ladies and some not so old peering between not-quite-closed curtains. With a squad of detectives I could turn up a score of people by noon to-morrow — I’ll wager a dozen Alfringham citizens saw Dr. Hartnell waiting outside Tuffnell’s office last night. I’m not even going to bother finding out.”
Mrs. Hartnell said softly, “He means it, Tom.”
“I mean it. Somebody is trying to divert suspicion to you, Hartnell. I want you to remain at home for the next two days — I’ll fix it at Mordon. You’re to talk to no one — no one — during that time. Take to your bed if you have to, but talk to no one. Your absence from work, your indisposition will be thought peculiar in the circumstances and will make somebody think our suspicions are directed towards you. You understand?”
“Completely. I’m sorry I was such a fool, Cavell, but—–**
“I wasn’t very nice myself. Good night.”
In my car Mary said wonderingly, “What on earth is happening to the legendary Cavell toughness?”
“I don’t know. Tell me.”
“You didn’t have to tell him that he wasn’t under suspicion. After he’d told his story you could just have said nothing and let him carry on to his work as usual. A man like that would be incapable of hiding the fact that he was worried to death and that would have suited your purpose of making the real murderer think we’re on to Hartnell just as well. But you couldn’t do it, could you?”
“I wasn’t like this before I got married. I’m a ruined man. Besides, if Hartnell really knew the evidence against him he’d go off his rocker.”
She was silent for some time. She was sitting on my left hand side and I can’t see people who are sitting to my left but I knew she was staring at me. Finally, she said, “I don’t understand.”
“I have three polythene bags in the rear seat. In one of them is a sample of dried red mud. Hartnell invariably takes the bus to work — but I found that mud, a peculiar reddish loam, under the front mudguard of his scooter: and the .only place for miles around with that type of soil is a couple of fields near the main gates of Mordon. In the second bag is a hammer I found in his toolshed — it looks clean, but I’m betting that a couple of grey hairs sticking to the haft came from our canine pal Rollo, who was so grievously clouted last night. The third bag contains a pair of heavy insulated pliers. They’ve been perfectly cleaned, but a comparison, by electronic microscope, of some scratches on it and the broken ends of the barbed wire in Mordon should give some very interesting results.”