Frequent Hearses Read Free Page B

had disappeared inside the studios. A shooting-brake, crammed with carpenters in overalls, emerged noisily from a hidden entrance to the left. But Fen hardly noticed it: in imagination he stood on the vacant, lamplit expanses of Waterloo Bridge, peering over the parapet at a figure which floundered through the shallows and the mud, dragging after him the limp, rent body of an auburn-haired girl… The cloud, driven hapless towards the north-west, had unveiled the sun again; yet for all that Fen shivered slightly, feeling on his mouth the night wind and in his nostrils the smell of the river at low tide. Such visions were not, of course, germane to the matter in hand: they would certainly be distorted, certainly incomplete. But it was with a curious reluctance that he put them aside…
    “Yes,” he said. “Go on.”
    Humbleby shifted uneasily—conscious, perhaps, that it is when a man is most sincere that he is apt to sound most histrionic.
    “The whole business,” he said, “was dealt with, of course, by the Divisional Superintendent. And he happens to be my brother-in-law—years ago, when he was only a sergeant, we were on a case together, and he met my sister at my flat and fell for her, God help him… Anyway, I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and being on holiday, I dropped in at the station yesterday morning, and he told me all about it. As you’ll have guessed, it was identifying the girl that was the difficulty. She’d dropped her handbag on the bridge, but there wasn’t anything at all revealing in it except for the photograph, and that didn’t have the photographer’s name on it. And her clothes were all new and not marked, so they didn’t help either.”
    “But the address,” said Fen, a little surprised at Humbleby’s ignoring what seemed the first and most obvious line of approach to the problem. “The address she gave to the taxi-driver.”
    “Useless. We found it all right, but it didn’t help us to identify her. She’d only moved in there the previous afternoon, and hadn’t so far either signed the register or handed over her ration-book. She’d told the landlady her name, of course, but the landlady was deaf and didn’t catch it… It really looked as if the Fates were in a conspiracy to make trouble for us.”
    “But her belongings—papers and so forth…”
    “Ah, yes. This is where the one really odd feature of the affair comes in.” And Humbleby paused, not displeased at having something mildly bizarre to relate. “By the time we got to it, her room and her things had been searched.”
    A ragged flight of blackbirds passed overhead, peering inquisitively down at the studio roofs. In a window in the wall directly facing them, a smooth-looking young man appeared, gazed at them suspiciously, muttered something to a companion invisible behind him, and vanished again. Humbleby, distrait, was playing with the door-handle. He was not normally a fidgety man, and Fen interpreted this as a sign of considerable perturbation.
    “Searched?” he said. “Searched for what?”
    “For signs of identification. Everything of that sort—papers, photographs, the fly-leaves of one or two books—had been removed and taken away. The laundry-marks had been cut out of all the clothes and the paper lining of the lid of a suitcase, which had obviously had a name and address on it, had been torn out. And whoever did it was thorough. We weren’t able to find a single thing he’d missed.”
    “But that’s extraordinary,” said Fen rather blankly. “If she’d been murdered, now… But I suppose there’s no doubt—”
    “None whatever. She killed herself all right. But mind you, there might quite well be someone who didn’t want her motive for killing herself to become known, and chose this rather oblique way of—um—occluding it… For instance, it’s possible she was pregnant. We shall know about that when the autopsy report comes in.”
    Fen nodded. “Odd,” he commented. “And