Free Frequent Hearses by Edmund Crispin Page B

s unexceptionally good health.
    “All the same, natural deaths do occur now and then,” said Humbleby rather nastily. “Just once in a while someone pops off for some reason other than malice aforethought. And the mere fact that Maurice Crane hadn’t been ill isn’t evidence. Everyone has to make a start with illness sooner or later.”
    “He was sick.” Capstick, who was becoming unnerved at his own inanition, plunged headlong in with what appeared to be one of the few incontrovertible features of the affair. “That was why he went out of the room. To be sick.”
    Both Fen and Humbleby ignored this—not because they wished to be rude but because it was so negative as to defy answering. And Capstick, brought once again to a stand, slumped back in his chair and wiped a large handkerchief across his mottled, sweating brow.
    “No, my point is this,” Humbleby went on. “Unless Crane’s death has some significant relation to the suicide of Gloria Scott, I’m trespassing on officially forbidden territory, and I must get off it, quick. But when I ask you to establish a significant relation, it turns out that all you can do is mutter about some reasonless foreboding or other…”
    “Damn it,” said Fen, nettled, “Crane was a material witness in the Gloria Scott affair, wasn’t he? You shouldn’t fret so much about red tape, Humbleby: it’s not as if there were any question of your taking charge of the case. All you’re doing is asking Capstick for his co-operation in dealing with a matter which may possibly be connected with it. Isn’t that so, Capstick?”
    “Ah,” said Capstick hurriedly. “Ah.”
    “All right,” said Humbleby, with the air of one compelled against his will to abandon all responsibility. “All right. But for heaven’s sake, why murder?”
    “Because someone tried to prevent you from finding out who Gloria Scott really was.”
    “Now, that’s an interesting thing,” said Capstick. “I remember once when we were rounding up a gang of racecourse touts—”
    “I fail altogether,” said Humbleby, “to see the connection.”
    Capstick was abashed. “I only thought,” he said submissively, “that it might be interesting for you to hear how—”
    “No, no. I mean the connection between the obliteration of Gloria Scott’s identity and the notion that Maurice Crane was murdered.”
    “Really, Humbleby, you’re unenviably dense.” And Fen stared at that officer in some suspicion. “You’d agree, I suppose, that the motive of the person who ransacked the girl’s rooms wasn’t to conceal her identity as ‘Gloria Scott’?”
    “I’ll grant you that, yes. Since she’s been in a film or two, that was bound to come to light pretty rapidly.”
    “The idea, then, was to conceal her real identity.”
    “Yes.”
    “And since the motive for her suicide was almost certainly something recent—that’s to say, something that had happened to her while she was calling herself Gloria Scott—then X’s purpose in turning her rooms upside down can’t very well have been to hide that motive.”
    “You mean,” Capstick interposed cautiously, “that if some chap was introduced to her as Gloria Scott and did her a mischief, and she killed herself because of it, then he couldn’t hope to avoid being tied up with the business just by cutting the laundry-marks out of her clothes and so forth?”
    “Exactly. You see, Humbleby, how readily Capstick has grasped the essentials of the situation.” And upon this unwitting irony Fen paused for breath. “Therefore X’s purpose in visiting her rooms was something quite different.”
    “There are a lot of loopholes in this exposition,” Humbleby complained. “Not to say—um—paralogisms. But go on. What was X’s purpose?”
    “As far as I can see, we’re bound to assume that his purpose was to keep secret a connection between himself and her which existed before she took the name of Gloria Scott and which ceased to exist—so far as