THE WORLD WAR COLLECTION OF H. C. MCNEILE (SAPPER). Sapper
round the plate on Sunday.
I forget what he wanted to talk to me about—something trifling, and he was just moving away when, somewhat to my surprise, Tim spoke to him. "Excuse me, sir," he said, "but weren't you out in Burma some years ago?"
Finlay paused and looked at him. "No, sir," he answered gravely. "I have never been out East."
"The last man I should imagine would have been, old boy," I said as Finlay moved away. "Unless it was a round the world trip in a liner."
"Let's have another, Bill," he remarked thoughtfully. "I'll swear I'm not mistaken."
I shrugged my shoulders. "Then why should he deny it?" I asked. "For I, on my side, will swear that there is nothing in Finlay's past that will not bear the closest investigation. Why, my dear boy, he damned near preaches in the Park."
"How long have you known him?"
"Four or five years. But only really as a club acquaintance." Out of the corner of his eye he was still watching Finlay, and I could see he was strangely excited.
"If I'm right," he said at length, "it's the most incredible thing that I have ever encountered in my life, and I've run against a few off and on."
"But if you'd known him out there he'd have remembered you," I objected.
"No: he wouldn't," said Tim. "Because he was so drunk on the one occasion I saw him that he couldn't remember anybody."
"Finlay drunk?" I remarked incredulously. "You must be wrong, Tim."
"Perhaps I am, Bill," he said after a while. "And perhaps I'm not. But one of my few assets is a memory for faces. A religious bloke, is he? Well, that covers a multitude of sins on occasions."
"I should be interested to hear which particular one it covers in his case," I said.
"Murder," remarked Tim quietly. "Cold blooded, brutal murder: planned out and premeditated over many years."
"My dear Tim," I protested feebly.
"And committed," he continued calmly, "since you've known him— to be correct, four years ago."
"But it's impossible," I spluttered. "You're pulling my leg. Who the deuce did he murder?"
"Look here, Bill," he said with a grin. "I may be talking the most appalling hot air, but I've got a hunch that I'm not. And anyway, the yarn might interest you. I'm busy all this afternoon, and I can't tell it to you over lunch: it's too long. But if you care to have a spot of dinner with me at my club, I'll spin it to you afterwards."
And at that we left it. Tim went off shortly after two, leaving me to my own devices, and as luck would have it I found myself in the smoking-room sitting next a man who knew Finlay far better than I did.
"It's mere idle curiosity on my part," I said, after a little desultory conversation, "but that man Finlay rather interests me. He was after me this morning for some society or other he's running at the moment. What does he do with himself when he's not touting round for money?"
My companion lit a cigarette. "I don't think he's got time for much else." he answered with a grin. "As a matter of fact, he's in a big jute firm in the City."
"How long has he been with them?"
"About five or six years. It was when he joined them that I first got to know him, because he came to live down close to me in Surrey, and being unmarried my missis and I started asking him over occasionally for dinner. A rum bird, but he's lonely, poor devil."
"Rum in what way?" I asked.
"Well, even the mildest story doesn't go down with him, for instance. He isn't exactly, shocked, but he simply gives one the impression that he regards you as a dirty little schoolboy. And, of course, on the subject of drink he is quite fanatical. Then again—women. Naturally, he is polite to my wife, but you can see at a glance that he dislikes the sex as a whole."
"What was he doing before he came to live there?"
"I don't know. He has never volunteered any information on the subject, and he's not the type of man you can question. From an odd remark or two he's made, I gathered he was in France during the War, and in the infantry."
"I suppose you don't happen to know if he's been out East," I hazarded.
My informant shook his head and rose. "He's never said anything about it," he answered, "but that doesn't mean that he may not have been. As I said, he's a rum 'un, but there's no doubt about it that in his own way he's a very decent fellow. He doesn't enliven a dinner table, but if I was in a hole he's a man I wouldn't hesitate to go to."
With a nod he was gone, leaving me to my thoughts. Assuredly Tim must have made a mistake: it was inconceivable to believe that such a man was a murderer. A chance likeness would account for it: any other solution was obviously absurd. In any case, how could he possibly say that a man he had met in Burma many years ago, and had never seen since, was responsible for a murder which had taken place recently. And so when we were comfortably seated in a corner of his club that evening I was prepared to listen to an interesting story, but Finlay was already acquitted.
Indeed, Tim himself had recanted, and admitted that it must be a question of an unusual likeness.
"Nevertheless," he remarked, "the story may interest you because it gives a very strange example of what an idee fixe will do to a man, and of the desperate passions which can be engendered by what on the face of it is a comparatively trivial thing. We admit even in England that under certain circumstances killing is justified. A man catching his wife with another man is one of them, and though we don't present him with a diploma of merit as they do in France, the chances are that he is let off lightly. Again, we have all of us heard of the overmastering rage that can be raised in a convict's breast if another convict hurts his pet mouse. I don't believe public opinion would ever tolerate that man being hanged, if in the heat of the moment he succeeded in killing the other. But my story concerns nothing so human as that: it concerns a gramophone record." He smiled as he saw my look of astonishment. "A common or garden gramophone record," he repeated. "Not even a valuable one, such, let us say, as one giving Caruso's actual voice which would be almost impossible to replace. It was just an ordinary record that could be bought by the dozen in any shop. However, of that in due course.
"We've got to go back to the year of grace 1910. I was doing a wander round in the East, and in the course of it I found myself up— country in Burma. The exact locality is of no importance, but I had been trekking for several weeks when I arrived at one of those little communities of white men which one finds scattered about in the back of beyond. Teak was the particular raison d'etre of this one, though the manner of living of the occupants varies but little whatever be the cause of their banishment. It was pestilentially hot: the rains were about due, and in consequence tempers were a bit on edge. The two married men had sent their wives down-country, so that even that small restraint was removed.
"The first man I butted into was a fellow called Congleton, whom I had met once or twice before. He was the manager, and one of the best. His liver wanted watching in the morning, but so do most people's out there. And he insisted that I should stop at his bungalow for as long as I liked.
"'The longer the better, Anstruther,' he said. 'Mary has gone back home, and I've got another six months before I'm due for leave. And, to tell you the truth, I'm fed up with my own and the rest of the company here.'
"So I agreed at any rate to remain a few days, and in the course of the first two I met the rest of the bunch. There was Rogerson, a great big hulking chap, foul mouthed always and violent in addition when he'd got a bit of liquor on board. There was Aldridge, quiet to the point of being almost morose, and two or three others whose parents had obviously not paid any attention to Kipling's dictum that East is East and West is West. Anyway, they don't come into the matter.
"You may remember that it was just about then that auction bridge was beginning, and it happened that I was the only man there who had any practical knowledge of the game. So, since they were all keen to learn, Rogerson and Aldridge came round each evening to Congleton's bungalow after tiffin, and I showed