Free Beware of the Trains by Edmund Crispin Page A

smelled of ether. “He didn’t think Scotland Yard had ever heard of him, and it must have given him a nasty turn when we hauled him out of bed in the middle of the night, and brought him along here. He was the only member of the group whose viciousness was likely to extend to murder, and that being so—”
    “Wait, wait,” Fen interposed fretfully. “I don’t understand any of this. Who is Mocatelli? Whom did he kill, and why? And what is the ‘group’ you mentioned?”
    At this, Humbleby’s satisfaction diminished visibly; he sighed. “It’s not,” he said, “that I’m personally unwilling to give you the facts. But there’s a certain rather delicate matter involved, and…” His voice trailed away. “Well, there you are.”
    “Discretion,” said Fen with great complacency, “is my middle name.”
    “I dare say. But very few people use their middle names… Calm, now: because I think I shall tell you about it in spite of everything. It’s possible you can help. And God knows,” said Humbleby seriously, “this is a case where we can do with some help.”
    He had been standing by the window. Now, with an air of decision, he turned and planted himself firmly in the swivelchair behind the desk. His office, to which they had returned immediately after the identification parade, was high up, overlooking the river, in a corner of New Scotland Yard: a small overcrowded room with a large number of (illegal) gas and electric stoves over which you tripped every time you attempted to stir. Filing-cabinets lined the walls; queerly assorted books were piled in tottering heaps in the corners; and the decorations ranged from a portrait of Metternich to a photograph of an unattractive pet Sealyham which had passed to its reward, at an advanced age, in the year 1919. Scotland Yard is as strictly run as any other office, and more strictly than most. But Humbleby’s position there was a peculiar one—in that for reasons which seemed good to him he had always refused to be promoted to Chief-Inspector—and so to a considerable extent he was allowed to legislate for himself in the matter of his surroundings. To that eyrie had come many who had allowed its untidy domesticity, and the tidy domesticity of its occupant, to make them over-confident. And not one of a long succession of Assistant Commissioners, on first introduction to it, had been short-sighted or stupid enough to do anything more than smile.
    Sprawled in the one armchair, Fen waited. And presently Humbleby—having outlined on the blotter, to his own immense satisfaction, a fat bishop—said: “We start, then, with this more than ordinarily cagey, more than ordinarily well-organised gang . It’s two years now since we first became aware of its existence; and although we’ve got a complete, or almost complete, list of the members’ names, together with a certain amount of good court-room evidence, we’ve been avoiding making arrests—for the usual reason that there’s been nothing very damning so far against the man we know to be in charge, and we’ve been hoping that sooner or later his agents, if left to themselves, will incriminate him . In that respect we’re not, even after last evening, very much better off than we were at the outset; and I think it’s quite likely that in view of Mocatelli’s arrest, which but for the murder we shouldn’t have contemplated, the head man will pack it up and we’ll never catch him. However, that remains to be seen.”
    “Any speciality?” Fen asked.
    “No. They’ve been very versatile: blackmail, smuggling, smash-and-grab, arson—all the fun of the fair. From our point of view it hasn’t been any fun, though, and that for more reasons than one. So there was a good deal of rejoicing the other evening when one of the gang, a man named Stokes, got drunk. picked up one of these crazy children who start painting their faces and wearing high-heeled shoes at the age of fourteen, and attempted a criminal