This Is Mr Fortune by Bailey H. C

Author:Bailey, H. C. [Bailey, H. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Anthology
Published: 1938-03-16T05:00:00+00:00

THE BURNT TOUT

THE DAY AFTER he pronounced sentence of death in the burnt tout case Sir Maule Trask came upon Mr. Fortune eating a muffin in a club. Trask has earned awe as the hardest sceptic of evidence on the bench, the bane of expert witnesses and policemen. But he stopped by Reggie Fortune’s chair and his frog - like eyes blinked and twinkled. “That should have given you satisfaction, Fortune,” he croaked.

Mr. Fortune looked up at him over an evening paper. “Satisfied you? Great is truth, what?”

“In the right hands. I do not recall a case more difficult for the police. The facts were perverted by a brain of singular subtlety. I have never had evidence of a police investigation so sagaciously directed.”

“Quite good, wasn’t it?” Mr. Fortune sighed. “Not by me, though.”

“You will permit me to give the credit to a controlling intelligence not always present.”

“Thanks very much,” said Mr. Fortune drearily.

“A sad story,” the judge nodded. “I have not been unaffected myself.”

Mr. Fortune watched him out of sight and read the paper again. Like all the others that day, it printed a leader to acclaim the triumph of justice in the burnt tout case, and assured the public that they could now depend on the police, armed with the unerring skill of modern science, to catch every murderer and right every wrong.

“Grrh!” said Mr. Fortune, and went to sleep wondering if old Trask meant anything - didn’t matter what he meant - couldn’t do anything.

Mr. Fortune was introduced to the case on an October dawn in a by - way of the suburbs.

The night before, a railwayman coming home from the Barnham coal sidings saw flames break out of a window. Among miles of neat criss - cross streets, the mess of the railway yards, the concert of their shunting and of the perpetual lorries on one of the busiest trunk roads, have preserved from rebuilding some of the narrow lanes, some of the ramshackle cottages which served Barnham when it was a scattered village outside London.

Cherrywood Lane has a dust cart depot now where the wood was. The blank wall of that confronts some half dozen cottages, each in a patch of garden. It was one of these which the railwayman found on fire. He ran to it shouting, and hammered at the door, but no answer came. To break in was impossible. The whole of the ground floor was ablaze.

He said afterwards that the neighbours were a ruddy long time turning out to the row he made. But the clatter of the coal yards and the roar of the high road have produced a lack of attention to noise, among those who sleep in Cherrywood Lane. Some of them did appear at last and went off to ring the fire alarm. Even then no policeman had arrived.

The fire brigade were not quick. They came promptly the nearest way, up Carter’s Lane, which is at the back of Cherrywood Lane cottage gardens. But there the fire escape ran over a man and had to stop, holding up the engine.

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