Free Beware of the Trains by Edmund Crispin Page B

assault in an alley within five yards of a constable on his beat.
    “We didn't rejoice at the actual event , of course: that was as nasty and depressing as these things always are. But it did enable us to arrest the man and to search his rooms. There, in due course, we came on a letter addressed to him and typewritten in code; and it wasn’t exactly difficult to deduce that this letter had something to do with the operations of the gang.
    “As you know, we’ve got a biggish Cipher Department here on the premises; and you’re aware, too, that complex ciphers—such as this one obviously was—are dealt with by quite elaborate team-work, helped out by machines. That’s as it should be, of course—but at the same time it tends to be rather a slow business: method, as opposed to intuition, always is slow. On the off-chance, then, of getting results more rapidly, I gave a copy of the cryptogram to Colonel Browley, and—”
    “Browley?” Fen interrupted. “You mean the man who ran the Cipher Department of M.I.5 during the war?”
    “That’s him. He retired in 1946 and went to live in Putney, where he’s been spending most of his time on botany and scientific gardening and stuff like that. But we still used him as a consultant expert from time to time, because there’s no doubt that he had a real flair for codes, and could sometimes solve them by a sort of inspired guess-work.”
    Fen nodded. “Putney,” he said. “Direct Tube-line to Westminster—and that was about where I picked him up.”
    “Oh yes: it was Browley who was murdered, unhappily. And having got that far, you’ll easily see why.”
    “You mean that he’d succeeded in decoding this letter; and that the letter was so important to the gang that they had to silence him and steal his report.”
    “Exactly… I can’t say”—here Humbleby wriggled uncomfortably—“I can’t say that any of us liked Browley very much. He was one of those men who somehow contrive to be fussy and careless at one and the same time—an exhausting combination—and latterly his mind had been going to seed rather: he was getting on for seventy, you see, though admittedly he didn’t look it… Well anyway, to get back to the point, Browley rang me up yesterday afternoon about this letter. I was out, as it happened; so he just mentioned his success and told the constable who answered the phone that he’d be coming here with his report during the evening—by which time I myself would be back. I’d warned him, you see, that the report was to be delivered to me and to me only.”
    There was a brief silence; then:
    “Oh,” said Fen, in a particular tone of voice.
    “So that when the constable offered to have it collected from Putney, Browley said that he had to come in to Town in any case, on some private errand or other… with the result you witnessed. From what we knew of this gang, Mocatelli was by far the likeliest man to have done the job. So we picked him up, and you and the Ayres woman have now identified him as the murderer, and that’s that.”
    “The sedan,” said Fen, “was waiting for Browley—not following him. It was known that he was coming.”
    And reluctantly Humbleby inclined his head. “Oh yes,” he said, “there’s a leak all right. There’s a leak somewhere in this Department. That’s half the reason why Mocatelli and his merry men have been getting away with it so easily—though since I first suspected a leak, some weeks ago, I’ve been keeping the more important information about the gang unobtrusively to myself; I imagine that if I hadn’t done that, we’d hardly have found Mocatelli at home when we went to call on him last night… Well, there it is: not a nice situation. Rare, thank God—miraculously so, when you compare our salaries with what a well-heeled crook can afford to offer—but very bad when it does happen.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m seeing the Assistant Commissioner about it in five minutes’ time. If