Murderer’s Trail
Ben the tramp is back at sea, a stowaway bound for Spain in the company of a wanted man – the Hammersmith murderer.Ben, wandering hungry through the foggy back alleys of Limehouse, is spooked by news of an old man murdered in Hammersmith – and runs! He crosses a plank, slips through an iron door, and goes to sea with the coal. But so does the man who did the murder, and a very pretty lady who did not. On the way, the Atlanta loses a stowaway, a pickpocket, a murderer, a super-crook, a wealthy passenger, the third officer and a lifeboat. And that is how Ben gets to Spain . . .Combining laughs and thrills on every page, J. Jefferson Farjeon’s books about the adventures of Ben the tramp entertained 1930s detective readers like no other Crime Club series, and Murderer’s Trail was more popular than ever.
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J. JEFFERSON FARJEON
Murderer’s Trail
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain for Crime Club by W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1931
Copyright © Estate of J. Jefferson Farjeon 1931
Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover background images © shutterstock.com
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008155919
Ebook Edition © August 2016 ISBN: 9780008155926
Version: 2016-06-28
Table of Contents
Chapter 3: The Stomach of a Ship
Chapter 4: Confidences in the Dark
Chapter 5: What Happened at Hammersmith
Chapter 8: In the Captain’s Cabin
Chapter 10: The Man with the Sack
Chapter 12: Hanging Over Space
Chapter 17: The End of the Voyage
Chapter 19: The Mountain Track
Chapter 20: Arrival at the ‘First Hotel’
Chapter 21: The Conference in the Hut
Chapter 22: The Binding of Ben
Chapter 23: The Chamber of Horrors
Chapter 25: How Mr Sims Killed Ben
Chapter 26: Life Grows Worse and Worse
Chapter 27: The End of the Bridge
Chapter 29: In a Spanish Bedroomio
Chapter 30: En Route for Villabanzos
Chapter 31: Exchange Is No Robbery
Chapter 34: Confidences in a Cellar
Chapter 37: The Events on the Road
Chapter 38: The Battle in the Cellar
‘Now, then,’ frowned the policeman, ‘where have you come from?’
The human scarecrow, of no address and with only half a name—the half he had was Ben, and the other half had been lost years ago—removed his eyes from the poster he had been staring at. The poster said, ‘Old Man Murdered at Hammersmith,’ and it was a nasty sight. But the policeman wasn’t much improvement. Policemen were blots on any landscape.
Where had he come from? Queer, how the world harped upon that unimportant question! As a rule it was an Embankment seat, or a coffee-stall, or a shop where they sold cheese, or an empty house where one could pass a night rent free. What did it matter? But the nosey-parker world seemed to think it mattered, and was always worrying him about it. Policemen in particular.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ demanded the policeman. ‘Where’ve you come from?’
‘Not ’Ammersmith,’ answered Ben.
His eyes wandered back to the poster. The policeman’s frown increased. Bent on being a nuisance, he persisted, with a tinge of sarcasm:
‘Quite sure of that?’
Faint indignation stirred within the scarecrow’s meagrely-covered breast. That was another thing about the world. Ben couldn’t do anything, but the world was always accusing him of everything!
‘Orl right, ’ave it yer own way,’ he said, with a sarcasm that far exceeded the constable’s. ‘I was walkin’ by ’im and I didn’t like ’is ’ead, so I chopped it orf.’
‘I suppose you think that’s funny?’ inquired the policeman.
‘Yus,’ retorted Ben. ‘There’s nothink like a nice little murder ter mike yer larf!’
Then the policeman decided that, unless the interview were concluded, the law stood a good chance of losing its superiority in the encounter without gaining anything in return; so, uttering a warning generality against the dangers of loitering and of back-chat, he leisurely adjusted his belt, turned, and trudged away.
Ben shivered. Despite the way in which he stuck up to them, policemen always made him shiver in his secret heart. If they never did anything to him, they always carried the threat! It wasn’t only the policeman, however, that made Ben shiver as he stood blinking in the gloaming. He had holes in his clothes, and the gloaming got through. There was a place on his knee open to three square inches of breeze. He had torn it on a nail seven weeks ago, and it occurred to him that it was about time to try and bump into someone with a needle and cotton. After seven weeks, the spot was getting cold.
