Free Beware of the Trains by Edmund Crispin

spoke very mildly—“who would maintain that such injustices are invariably rectified at a higher court.”
    “Ah.” Wakefield sat up abruptly. “And why do they maintain that? They maintain it because they believe the Universe to be subject to Laws, and they believe that because the phenomenal flux, without the concept of Order, is psychologically intolerable. Aldous Huxley—”
    “Have some more port,” said Haldane.

Within the Gates
    It was immediately outside the entrance to an office building, within a stone’s throw, almost, of New Scotland Yard, that the thing happened.
    The Whitehall area is sacred—if that is the right word—to Government. Trade leads a hole-and-corner existence there, and a house given over to non-ministerial purposes is enough of a rarity in the district to attract fleeting attention from the idle passer-by. Thus it was that Gervase Fen, ambling with rather less than his usual vigour from St. Thomas’s Hospital, where he had been visiting a friend, towards St. James’s Park, through which he proposed strolling prior to dinner at the Athenaeum, paused to examine the brass plates and sign-boards flanking this particular doorway; and in so doing found himself shoulder to shoulder with a man who had just half a minute to live.
    At this time—eight o’clock in the evening—the street was almost empty, a near-vacuum shut away from the Embankment traffic on one side and the Whitehall traffic on the other. A street-lamp gleamed on the brass and the white-lettered wood: trade journals mostly, Fen noted—Copper Mining, Vegetation, the Bulb Growers’ Quarterly, Hedging and Ditching. A little beyond the doorway, an elderly woman had halted to rummage in her shopping-bag; and immediately outside it, a neatly dressed man with a military bearing, who had been preceding Fen along the pavement, glanced up at the streetlamp, drew from a pocket three sheets of typewritten foolscap clipped together with a brass fastener, came to a stop, and began reading. Fen was beside him for no more than a moment, and had no cause to notice him particularly; leaving him still scanning his typescript, he walked on past the woman with the shopping-bag and so up to the end of the street. Behind him, he heard a car moving away from the pavement—presumably it was the black sedan which he had seen parked at the entrance to the street. But there was no way in which he could have anticipated the tragedy that followed.
    The note of the car’s engine altered; one of its doors clicked open and there were rapid footsteps on the pavement. Then, horribly, the woman with the shopping-bag screamed-and Fen, swinging round, saw the soldierly-looking man grapple with the stranger who had emerged from the waiting sedan. It was all over long before Fen could reach them. The assailant struck viciously at his victim’s unprotected head, snatched the typescript from his hand as he fell, and scrambled back into the car, which slewed away from the curb with a squeal of tyres, and in another instant was gone. Pausing only to note its number and direction, Fen ran on and bent over the huddled body at which the woman was staring in dazed, helpless incomprehension. But the skull was crushed; there was nothing, Fen saw, that he or anyone else could do. He stood over the body, allowing no one to touch it, until the police arrived.
    And at eleven o’clock next morning: “Very satisfactory,” said Detective-Inspector Humbleby of the Metropolitan C.I.D. “Very satisfactory indeed. Between you, you and that Ayres woman are going to hang Mr. Leonard Mocatelli higher than Haman. And a good riddance, too.”
    “The man must be quite mad.” As was allowable in an old and trusted friend of the Inspector’s, Fen spoke somewhat petulantly. “Mad, I mean, to commit murder under the noses of two witnesses. What did he expect?”
    “Ah, but he hadn’t got a record, you see.” Humbleby lit a cheroot with a new-fangled pocket-lighter which