Six Suspects

The police station in Marlow Cross consisted of two rooms and a single cell, in which for the last three years the only overnight guest had been Mrs Hobbs's ginger cat, whenever it was thrown out of the boarding house. On Saturday morning, for the first time in eight years of service, Constable Doyle felt that two rooms were not enough. In the first sat the people he had summoned. In the second sat Doyle himself, at a table covered in green baize, with his notebook, three sharpened pencils and a glass of water he never touched.

The county had promised to send an inspector, but yesterday's rain had undermined the bridge over the Avon, and the inspector, so the telephone said, "will arrive as soon as the weather permits". Doyle had put down the receiver with a feeling in which fear and pride were mixed so thoroughly that he could not have separated them under oath.

Six people. Six keys. One night.

He began with the ones he knew least.

* * *

Helen Frost sat down on the chair opposite him as if the chair were hers and Doyle a client come to ask for an unsecured loan. She was about forty-five: a navy suit, a streak of grey in impeccably dressed hair, thin-rimmed spectacles which she removed whenever she wanted the person across from her to feel uncomfortable.

"Between ten and midnight on Thursday I was at the bank," she said, without waiting to be asked. "End of quarter. A report for head office in Bristol. The night watchman, Mr Price, let me out at eleven-fifteen; he'll confirm it. Before that I sat in my office alone. My office windows face the square, and the light was on all evening. Anyone passing the Crown would have seen it."

"You've… come prepared, madam."

"I manage a bank, Constable. I always come prepared." Off came the spectacles. "You want to ask why I have a key to Oscar's back room. I'll tell you. Twelve years ago the shop was on the verge of bankruptcy. The bank lent Oscar money against the building and the stock. I personally insisted that the bank should have access to the most valuable part of the collateral. The key is kept in a safe-deposit box with the deeds. I have never used it."

"And the loan? Has it been… repaid?"

Something stirred very slightly at the corner of her mouth.

"Nearly. The balance is a matter of banking confidentiality. But I can tell you this much: Oscar's death has not brought the bank a penny. Rather the reverse."

She rose, adjusted her gloves, and at the door turned back.

"He came to see me on Wednesday, Constable. He asked whether he could look at the box where his key was kept. I allowed it. He opened it, looked at the key, closed it and left. Didn't say a word. I thought an old man simply wanted to be sure the world was still where he'd left it." She paused. "I don't think that now."

* * *

Tobias Lane arrived in black — a mourning band on his sleeve, a black tie, a face he had evidently prepared in front of a mirror. He talked a great deal, softly, with the velvet regret with which in small towns people speak at funerals of men they have not greeted for twenty years.

"Forty years, Constable. Forty years we knew each other. Oscar and I started out together — did you know? A little shop on William Street, before the war. Then we each went our own way, but…" He spread his hands, and a signet ring glinted on his finger. "Such things aren't forgotten."

"Where were you on Thursday between ten and midnight, sir?"

"In the Crown until half past ten. Ask anyone — I was playing dominoes with Mr Rowley and young Bennett. Lost three shillings, as it happens. Then I went home. Alone. My wife, as you know, left me six years ago, and I have no dog, so there's no one to speak up for me."

"You called at the shop on Thursday evening," said Doyle, checking his notes. "Mr Hale says you spoke to Mr Renwick about some letter."

The smile froze for a moment. Only a moment.

"A business proposal. I wanted to buy a few pieces from Oscar for a collector in London. He refused. Old men can be stubborn, Constable. That's no crime on their part, or on mine."

He left behind him the scent of expensive cologne and the feeling that Doyle had just listened to a well-rehearsed play with one act missing.

* * *

The Reverend Arthur Pembry held his hat in his hands and kept crushing its brim, as though he hoped to wring some answer out of the felt. He was seventy-four — Oscar's age — tall and bony, with the sad eyes of an old dog that remembers everyone it has outlived.

"I was at home," he said quietly. "At the vicarage. Writing my sermon for Sunday. Mrs Dale, my housekeeper, went to bed at half past nine. I sat up until one. Alone."

"Had you seen Mr Renwick recently?"

The pause was long. Too long.

"No. We… hadn't talked properly for some time. A few weeks."

Doyle wrote it down. Then he looked up.

"The driver of the last bus from Hartford, Mr Simms, says he saw you on Marlow Street on Thursday at a quarter to eleven. Outside the shop."

The hat in the vicar's hands went still. The old man looked at the constable as one looks at someone who has suddenly begun speaking a foreign language.

"I… was walking," he said at last. "The sermon wouldn't come. I went out for a walk. I often do. The shop window was dark, Constable. Completely dark. I stood there for a while and went home."

"You didn't knock?"

"No." And, more quietly, almost in a whisper: "God forgive me. No."

* * *

Maureen Cobb came with red, inflamed eyes, in the same grey cardigan, and Doyle suddenly felt ashamed of making this small woman, who had spent twenty-two years dusting other people's clocks, sit across from him on a hard chair.

"I left at twenty past six, with Miss Renwick," she said. "I was home by twenty to seven. I listened to the wireless, a concert from London. Mrs Turner next door knocked on the wall for me to turn it down, about half past ten. She always knocks."

"Mr Renwick had been asking you about your key recently."

"Yes." She gripped her handbag. "He asked whether I was sure I'd never given it to anyone. I said I was sure. He thanked me and…" her lips trembled, "…and said, 'I know, Maureen. I just had to ask everyone.'"

"Everyone?"

"That's what he said."

Doyle waited. He could see she wanted to say something more, that the words were standing behind her teeth like water behind a dam. But the dam held. Maureen lowered her eyes and began to talk about the weather.

* * *

Gwendolyn Renwick gave her statement clearly and briefly: Mrs Hobbs's boarding house, supper at seven, a book in her room, bed at about eleven. Mrs Hobbs confirmed the supper. The rest no one could confirm, because Gwendolyn had her own key to the front door of the boarding house, and at ten, when the landlady drew the bolt, the girl could have been anywhere.

She did not tell Doyle about the letter. The letter in which her uncle had written: "I need someone with my blood in their veins." She did not know why herself. Perhaps because she was afraid the constable would read in those lines something that was not there. Or perhaps because she was afraid of reading in them what was.

* * *

Doyle left Edwin till last.

They sat facing each other — the young constable, whom Edwin remembered as a small boy who had lost the key to his father's shed and sat sobbing on the doorstep, and the old locksmith who had opened that shed in a minute with a nail and a bit of wire.

"Where were you, Mr Hale?"

"At home, Percy. Alone. Like every evening these last two years."

"Did anyone see you?"

"Only my wife's photograph on the mantelpiece. But she won't give evidence."

Doyle did not smile. He looked for a long time at his notebook, where six names stood in a column, and beside each an alibi. Beside some, solid as granite. Beside others, full of holes like an old sieve. And beside one — nothing.

"You understand how this looks, Mr Hale," he said at last. It was not a question.

"I understand."

"Your lock. Your counter. Your word that the mechanism can't be fooled. And not a single witness."

"I understand, Percy."

The constable closed his notebook. Then he did something Edwin had not expected: he sighed, the way boys sigh when they have been given an impossible task, and spoke in quite a different voice.

"I'm not arresting you. Not yet. Because I'm not a fool, whatever they think in the county. The man who made that lock wouldn't commit murder behind it — he'd know suspicion would fall on him first. But I need your help. On Monday I'm taking the lock off the door. You'll dismantle it in front of me. If there's a way round it, I want to know what it is. If there isn't…" He stopped.

"If there isn't," Edwin finished calmly, "then the murderer is me. Or a miracle."

"I don't believe in miracles, Mr Hale. I believe in iron."

Edwin stood, put on his hat, and at the door turned round.

"Two of the six told you lies, Percy. Maybe three. I saw your face when you came out into the corridor."

"And you? Did you tell me the truth?"

The old locksmith thought about it. Honestly thought, because Percy Doyle deserved honesty.

"All of it I know," he said. "The trouble is, I don't know nearly enough yet."