The Heel of Achilles: A Golden Age Mystery Read online

But that he was entitled to have half the value placed on them, Porter conceded. Thus, while he protested to Canley at each of the demands, saying that he had already paid back the value to the owners of the jewels, he acknowledged the debt, up to the £500 asked for by his blackmailer.

  With the last of the amount paid over a week or two before, Porter breathed a sigh of relief. He was now clear of the mythical debt which Canley had claimed. That was what the man had asked for, and now he had received it. The debt was passed and done with.

  And only just in time. There had been for Porter increasing difficulty in hiding from Mary the fact that money was going out from the garage account in considerable sums for which no corresponding advantage in the business could be seen.

  Mary had been from the first his adviser on developments and extensions of the garage business. It was she who had worked out the possibilities of new ventures, and the cost plus the time needed to get back the money. She had decided that a hoist to ease the task of greasing, and to enable greasing by pressure to be carried out, would be an advantage to the garage. In addition it would greatly reduce the labour on certain types of underneath repairs. She had recommended, and the recommendation had been adopted, the putting aside of a small sum each week towards the cost of the hoist, together with the cost of installation. This was the money, the only money, with which Porter had been able to satisfy the demands of Canley.

  Mary, who knew to a shilling what should be in the account, had been urging that the hoist should now be obtained. At his wit’s end to find a way out of the impasse, Jack had invented an excuse that hoists were not available at the moment, but that the makers would let him have the first one that they could release after the completion of earlier orders.

  Unfortunately, a few days before the arrival of Canley’s letter, Mary had read an advertisement of hoists for immediate delivery, and had suggested that now was the time to acquire the one wanted.

  By scraping together every penny he could get his hands upon, Jack had acquired a little over £100, which would be sufficient for him to take delivery, whatever else was owing to be paid off at a later date.

  The demand for £100 from Canley put paid to that idea. The thought of murder that he had toyed with as a mental escape from Canley, now became essential. He decided to kill Canley as a way out of his continual blackmail—and to save the £100 which was the only chance of keeping from Mary the story of the presence of Canley to trouble them for the rest of his life.

  The decision made, he found that his earlier mental planning had given him a good background for the perpetration in reality. It had been his habit during his visits to the cottage with money, to note the lay of the land, and subsequently to spend many pleasant hours in working out on paper how simple it could be to get away with Canley’s murder.

  It sort of cheered up Porter between the spells of paying out to think that he was plotting to end it all. Building castles in the air, so to speak. Now that he had decided that the castle should have a more permanent anchorage—on the ground—he proceeded to examine the position more closely, and to co-relate all the knowledge of the man which he had gained by introspective thinking. The more he looked into the idea the more sure he became that the murder of Canley could be done easily and safely.

  The fact that Canley lived in the small and secluded cottage on the outskirts of the village, and that he lived alone was an advantage. Porter took the view that the absence of a woman or a man in the cottage was less meanness than, probably, necessity. There had been a number of burglaries in the district, in which he, Porter, thought he recognized the hand of Canley, or rather of Sprogson. With his cottage lonely and empty at night, there was nobody to say what time he came in at night, or if he left again after he had once returned, or even whether he had been out at all.

  Porter’s visits to the cottage and seeming willingness to make the ‘loans’ to Canley had led to a feeling of friendliness between them, or so it had seemed to Canley. In consequence, Porter had learned much of the mode of living of his intended victim. He knew, for instance, that the day woman left in the ordinary way about 7.30 p.m. after she had prepared the evening meal for her employer, and that she did not appear again at the cottage until the following morning when she came to make breakfast.

  Still another advantage was that the cottage was one of the only two in the lane, and was, in fact, some distance away from the other. In between were high hedges which shielded any vision of one from the other. The lane itself was not so much a thoroughfare as a track between fields. It seemed to have been started by people walking along the grass. When this became a habit, someone apparently dumped rubble in the centre so that there was a definite track, rough and unmetalled. Grass grew on either side of the track. It was one of those country lanes that hikers like to find, because it is lovely and rural!

  Some 200 yards below Canley’s house the path passed under a bridge which carried the railway line to Thames Pagnall station, and thence on to the terminus. It was this fact that had interested Porter during his joumeyings to Canley’s cottage and in his metaphorical murder planning, for he saw possibilities in the railway. He was not such a fool as to think that he could obviously murder Canley and get away with it. He had too much fear of the law. If Canley had to die, then it would have to appear to be accidental death. It was in that connection that Porter saw possibilities in the railway line.

  One of the reasons for the path which passed Canley’s cottage was that it was a short cut from the outskirts of the village on the west side to the station, and also for the neighbouring village which joined Thames Pagnall. Also, it was a short cut from that part of the village to the main street and the popular ‘local’.

  It happened this way: immediately past the railway arch and on the left of it a narrow path led from the lane up to the railway lines. It was not a prepared path, but a kind of trodden path made through the grass of the embankment by people who had used it for a short cut; they had, as it were, established a kind of right of way, if you understand what is meant by that. If one wanted to get to the station one walked up this path until the gravelled bank was struck, which led along the side of the metals to the platform some hundred yards away.

  If a person were making a short cut to the village, then at the top of the path he stepped over the two sets of train lines, walked a few yards in the direction of the station, and then descended a similar path on the other side of the railway embankment, which was, of course, on the other side of the bridge. This performance put the pedestrian within five minutes’ walk of the shopping centre of the village and of the shops and ‘local’, whereas if the road was followed round it meant a walk of over a quarter of an hour.

  The spot was pretty lonely on a winter’s night. The people of Thames Pagnall did not go in for a great deal of night life; a concert by the children of the school sometimes, a whist drive in the church hall, the annual performance of the Choral Society was about the extent of the night haunts, except for the once a year dinner of the cricket club.

  Again, only one or two of the villagers ever used the path after dusk, and they were mostly home-goers taking the short cut from the station. Nobody tried the short cut to the village after dark; it meant stepping over two live rails in darkness, for the line was pretty well shadowed by trees which grew along the bottom of the embankment on which the railway was laid.

  When he had decided that his only safeguard was to remove Canley, Jack Porter turned over these facts in his head; they were pretty familiar to him already, for he had noted them on his comings and goings from the cottage on the occasions which in the past few months he had visited Canley. With an idea of linking the railway with the murder he set himself to testing an idea that came into his mind.

  Making an excuse to Mary that he had to visit a customer who was occupied in his London office during the daytime hours, he took a bus to Thames Pagnall. At the stop at the back of the village, he left the bus and proceeded on foot to the lane. Noting the su
rroundings in the darkness as best he could, he walked past Canley’s cottage, which was in darkness. Thence he proceeded along the lane, climbed the path to the railway lines, stepped over both the live rails and stood at the top of the path on the other side. He did not descend, however, but walked along the side of the metals to the up-line platform of the station. There he spent some time in the waiting-room studying the timetable which was displayed on a large board.

  This showed that the last train down to the terminus passed through the station at 11.35 p.m. It stayed at the terminus until the following morning. There was no train up until 6.30 a.m., so that there would be six hours in which to make an alibi, and render himself perfectly safe, because if his plans went right, Canley’s body would not be found until the first morning train.

  Two nights later, Porter, his plans worked out, made the journey again, timing its progress with his watch, and checking off the programme which he was proposing to carry out. Again he passed no person in the lane, or on the path over the railway. The only light to be seen on this second night was in the cottage of Canley.

  Creeping quietly to the window, he peered through a crack in the curtains. Canley, he saw, was in the living-room with a woman—a large red-haired woman with whom the man had been consorting at race meetings. Porter had seen them together on various occasions; he had ruminated that there on the woman’s back was going the money he had earned so hardly, and of which he was being bled by Canley.

  He made a change in his walk on this second night. Instead of making for the station and leaving by the runway down to the road and a bus stop, as on the previous occasion, he turned in the opposite direction after crossing the live rails, and, still on the permanent way, walked in the direction of the junction station a mile or so along.

  The time was shortly after 11.30 p.m. and within a minute or two the noise of an approaching train and the singing of the metals told him that the last train down to the terminus was approaching. A glance at his luminous-dialled watch told him that it was on time.

  As it turned the bend and accelerated on the run to the station, Porter lay down flat on his stomach at the edge of the embankment. If he put into operation the plan he had in mind, it would have been dangerous for the driver of the train to remember having on any night seen a man walking along the permanent way. Such a recollection might well, he argued, arouse suspicion, and examination of the line could lead to the discovery of footprints—a source of identification that might lead to his undoing.

  The train passed on, and Porter, secure in the knowledge that it would be impossible for the driver to have seen him, rose to his feet and continued his walk along the permanent way for half a mile or so, until he reached another bridge which, in this case, crossed over a main road. There he clambered down the embankment and climbed over a fence on to the road. The junction was a matter of half a mile or so, away. Ten minutes later he walked on to the junction railway platform and took a train back to Staines. There were no more than a dozen people in the train, and he occupied a compartment to himself.

  It was a long way round to reach home again, and the journey from Thames Pagnall could have been shortened by taking a bus from the village. Porter had considered this as a possible means of transport back to Staines, but had discarded it as being not so safe as the train journey. If his safety was to be assured, then it was vital that there was no possibility of his being recognized as having been in the vicinity on the night of the murder—for he had now decided on the murder and the means of it. He figured that to make the return journey by bus would mean that the conductor would have about half an hour to take a good look at him, and be able to recognize him as a passenger from Thames Pagnall if he were required to do so. Not that Porter thought there was any danger of that, since the death of Canley was to have the appearance of pure accident; but it was best to leave no loophole to chance.

  At each stage of the journey, Porter took note of the times in order that there should be no snag when it was put into serious operation. The journey on this second night was, in fact, corresponding to the dress rehearsal of a play on the stage, in which the final form and timing of the presentation are settled once and for all.

  But with one difference: whereas the stage presentation has its dress rehearsal only when the play is actually in being and settled, the rehearsal of Jack Porter was in the nature of a test of whether, indeed, the performance should be given at all; whether his suggested plans should be proceeded with or whether they should be abandoned and the money paid out to Canley.

  More than the blackmail was at stake; if anything went wrong, then Porter knew his life would probably be forfeit.

  For the next two days he studied carefully the stages of the journey he had made and the stages which at the moment existed only in his imagination, and which had to be translated into deeds. Between the times of his entering and leaving Canley’s cottage there had to be done things on which his neck depended; he sat down carefully and cautiously to plan them and decide whether they could be accomplished.

  Gradually The Plan was born in his mind. He turned it over step by step, remodelling and altering proposals here and there until, at last, he chuckled to himself that he had a cast-iron plot of murder that nothing could detect as being other than an accident.

  He planned to put it into execution on the following Friday night—the night on which the note from Canley ordered him to take the hundred pounds, the first sum over the £500 at which he had placed his responsibility to Sprogson and the proceeds of his unwilling burglary.

  CHAPTER VII

  Friday passed through its hours very little differently from any other day for Jack Porter. He handled a number of repair orders on half a dozen cars, interspersed with the filling of petrol tanks and the supply of the various odds and ends associated with a garage and service station. Dinner was taken with Mary as usual and so was tea. At nine o’clock he closed the garage for the night—his customary hour.

  He had intimated to Mary that he would be attending to a business job after the closing of the garage and would probably not return until somewhere about midnight; the consequence was that she had prepared a meal for nine o’clock instead of the usual snack which they took just before retiring to bed. At nine-thirty o’clock Jack kissed her adieu and set out on his errand.

  He found himself remarkably unconcerned and well at ease. The fact astonished him. He had thought that he would inevitably be under some nervous strain at the thought of the murder for which he was setting out, that he would feel some anxiety at the perpetration of the deed. Instead, he had within him a feeling of peacefulness and satisfaction at the knowledge that within a very few hours his life would be free from the menace of Canley. Any thought of failure, or of discovery, was missing from his mentality; his plan, he was quite sure, was beyond fault, and outside the bounds of failure.

  The first part was put into operation immediately he had waved a farewell to Mary from the roadway. He drove his garage car in the opposite direction to Thames Pagnall. Two hundred yards down the road he turned into the yard of the Bricklayers’ Arms. In the bar were several men he knew by sight, and who knew him and his garage. For one of these he purchased a drink, at the same time ordering a brandy for himself.

  Over the drinks he led the conversation round to business, bemoaning the fact that he had to go at this time of night, after a hard day’s work, to a car job near Guildford some twenty miles away. That, he thought, would ensure that in the event of any inquiries—which was not at all likely so far as he could see—would give him an alibi in the opposite direction to Canley.

  With the commiserations of his acquaintances in his ears he left the ‘Arms’ and drove away in the direction of Guildford. Within a few minutes, however, he turned into a side road and doubled back on his tracks. Parking his car in a market car park where it would attract no attention, since cars were often left there until the small hours, he walked to Staines station and took a train to the junction. From there
he put into operation the time-table of his two nights’ rehearsal, but in reverse. That is to say, he walked along the main road until he reached the bridge down the side of which he had climbed to regain the road on the rehearsal night on leaving the permanent way. He climbed the bank and reached the track. From there, keeping to the edge of the ballast, he walked in the direction of Thames Pagnall station.

  Once, as on the night of his test, he lay down by the side of the embankment as a train came along, lest he should be seen by the driver or the guard. The train passed, and, rising, he continued his walk. Within twenty minutes he had reached the path across the short cut leading to the lane in which stood the cottage of Canley. There he crossed the two lines of metals and descended into the lane. But not by the path. It was part of his plan that no footsteps should be found there, at least not any that could be identified to him; he descended carefully down the grass of the embankment a few yards further along.

  Once in the lane he walked in the direction of the cottage, keeping in the long grass verge that edged the track. Such marks as he made would be obliterated, for the grass would recover during the night and spring upright again by the morning, thus hiding any evidence of traversing. The verge ran up to the gate of the cottage, and there Porter put into operation the second part of The Plan. From the gate to the door of the cottage there ran a flagged path, made of concrete slabs such as those used for pavements for the ordinary footwalks of a city street. Porter had noted them on his many visits to Canley, and recognized that they represented the danger that on a night such as this traces of visitors to the cottage might be left on their tell-tale surface.

  That was the first thing that Porter had prepared against.

  Before he left the grass verge of the lane he took off his boots, and in his stockinged feet crept quietly up the path to the door of the cottage. One of the points of his plan was that there should be no bootmarks left on the path; at least no bootmarks other than those of Canley himself.