Read Online Beware of the Trains by Edmund Crispin - Free Book Online Page B

enough for your reply to reach him in time for the final rehearsal. I’ve made a note of his queries, and if you write off to him some time this afternoon, that should be all right.’
    “Pasmore would believe this—why shouldn’t he?—and the reply to Brice would be written. And all that Angela had to do after that was to destroy the notes she’d made of Brice’s queries and the envelope, typed by herself and with a local postmark on it, in which Brice’s letter arrived at the house for the second time. Between four-twenty and four-thirty, of course, she entered Pasmore’s study and killed him.”
    There was a brief, astonished silence; then: “Brilliant!” Haldane exclaimed. “Really brilliant… Only”—his enthusiasm waned slightly—“there are a lot of things which could have gone wrong. Pasmore might just have omitted to write the reply; or it might not have been long enough—though I suppose that in view of the number of queries he had to answer it was bound to be fairly long; or it might have contained some very definite reference to the hour of day at which it was being written. Or Sir Charles mightn’t have turned up; or the letter —life being what it is—mightn’t have arrived by the afternoon post; or—”
    “Yes, yes, I know all that,” said Fen. “But you must realise that all those possible accidents and possible flaws in the scheme have one thing in common: if they were going to happen at all, they would happen before the murder . So if anything had gone wrong, Pasmore would quite simply not have been killed—not on that day, and in that particular way. Angela, I can assure you, is a cautious woman as well as a clever one.”
    “Is,” said someone sombrely; and again there. was silence.
    “I suppose she missed the point of ‘Lacrimae rerum,’” said Haldane at last. “Interpreted it, that’s to say, as just a general comment on neighbours’ radios… She’d read the letter, of course, before killing Pasmore.”
    Fen nodded. “Certainly she would. It’s to be presumed that Pasmore put it in her bedroom about four o’clock, and that she read it there, at twenty past four, before going to the study and killing him… I don’t know why I say ‘presumed.’ By Angela’s own admission, that’s what in fact happened. I wrote to her, you see, and by return of post she sent me congratulations on my perspicuity and a circumstantial account of the crime. It’s a queer document—unique, of course: no trace of vanity or megalomania, and yet it makes me shiver every time I look at it.”
    ‘“She got Pasmore’s money, then?”
    “Oh, yes. And has lived very comfortably on it ever since.”
    “But look here,” said Wakefield with sudden energy, “you can’t possibly maintain that she arranged for Pasmore”s letter to be her alibi and then forgot about it.”
    “Of course she didn’t forget. She only pretended to—that was the whole point of her scheme. We’re back where we started, you see; this is where the business of the ‘perfect crime’ comes in. Your murder which looks like natural death—well, it’s satisfactory up to a point; but the murderer can never be quite sure that one day, perhaps years after, some accident may not reveal the truth and send him to the gallows. His only road to absolute immunity from punishment is to be tried and acquitted, for it’s a basic principle of English Common Law that nemo debet bis vexari —that no one may be tried a second time for the same offence. Angela wanted to be tried, in order that she might be acquitted and live afterwards in perpetual immunity. Hence Pasmore’s letter was ‘forgotten’ until the right moment for its use arrived. Angela took a great deal of risk, of course. But it worked out very nicely for her in the end.”
    “Well, I consider it’s abominable,” said Haldane with disgust. “When one thinks that nothing— nothing —can be done to punish the woman…”
    “There are those”—Fen