by Zenith Brown
“Now the driver knew Colton was carrying stones when he saw the black satchel, but not before. He didn’t know their value. He says Colton was never armed. Can’t explain the automatic in the side pocket of the car. Had no idea there was one there. Sometimes carried a gun himself, when he knew Colton had jewels, but always without Colton’s permission. And that’s about all, sir. I ought to have the report on Peskett—that’s the driver—pretty soon, and I. have to sec Steiner now. Then I’m going to find the clerk, Smith, and see that Colton household again. This isn’t as clear as it looks, sir.”
Debenham nodded as Inspector Bull departed.
“Well,” said Chief Inspector Dryden, “he may be right, sir. But I think it’s important that that driver is an American. Some of these Americans are pretty lousy.”
“Dryden,” said the Commissioner, “where in God’s name do you get these appalling expressions?”
Dryden grinned sheepishly.
“My son’s engaged to an American college girl, sir.”
“Dryden, you’re just the man I’ve been looking for. You meet the deputation from the Philadelphia traffic division this afternoon.”
CHAPTER NINE
Inspector Bull left the Commissioner’s office expecting to go at once to see Albert Steiner in Hatton-garden. It was not the first time a case had taken him there; he had heard strange tales of human greed and depravity from the short enigmatic Jew, peering myopicaily through incredibly heavy lenses, and smiling quietly, with half the wisdom of Solomon in his dark voice, across the wide oak table in that unobtrusive shop. Mr. Steiner knew a great deal that Scotland Yard would like to know. Both Scotland Yard and Mr. Steiner knew this, but neither ever referred to it. Mr. Steiner was always willing to help the police, but, as Commissioner Debenham once remarked, Steiner was born a thousand years before Scotland Yard was thought of. Still, Bull was counting on him—for what, he did not quite know.
And yet, he did. He wanted to know precisely why they were reappraising Mrs. Royce’s diamonds. There seemed to &-several theories about that. If Mrs. Colton was right in believing her husband had a purchaser for them, Mrs. Royce gained £ 20,000 by the robbery; for, granting that Mr. Smedley was right about the depreciation, Colton could not sell them for more than £ 15,000, and they were insured for £ 35,000.
If, on the other hand, Mr. Smedley was right in thinking that Mrs. Royce had no idea of selling the stones, it was a slightly different matter. If she had decided to pocket her loss and unload, she was interested in having actual cash. If she was merely having them reappraised at the request of the assurance company, it was evident she did not need money at all.
In either case she gained, naturally, some £ 20,000 by their loss, and by any standard was devilishly fortunate. On the second assumption, that she had not intended to sell, she would have a great deal of money when she had expected none. On the first assumption, that she had intended to sell, she would have a great deal of money more than she had expected. In one case she might conceivably have regrets for the theft—assuming what Inspector Bull, having seen Mrs. Royce, was entirely unable to do, that she had a sentimental attachment to her jewels. In the other case she could only be delighted at her unexpected windfall. Unless—here Inspector Bull stopped with inborn and trained caution—she had expected just what she got. Was it possible . . . ?
The telephone on his desk was jangling, and Bull answered it impatiently. He wanted to be on his way to Hatton-gar-den.
He recognised the slow, slightly husky voice of Mrs. Colton.
“Mr. Smith, my husband’s clerk, is here, Inspector Bull. He’s in a very bad state. If you want to talk to him you’ll have to hurry, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll be right along,” Bull said.
He put down the receiver and took up his hat and overcoat. Mr. Steiner in Hatton-garden could wait. It seemed that Mr. Smith in Cadogan-square could not.
Bull was accustomed to the air of mystery that housemaids adopt when they admit the police. As much as to say, “Between ourselves this doesn’t surprise me. If you’d lived here as long as I have you’d expect anything to happen in this house.” He recognised the girl as the one he’d talked to that morning, but he had no time for her.
“I could of told him a few,” she observed when she went back to the kitchen where tea was being finished. “However, if he’s so high and mighty . . .”
Mrs. Coggins the cook shook her head. “You leave policemen be, my lass, it’s no concern of yours.”
“It not, isn’t it? Well I’d like to know whose it is, then. It’s all very well to talk, but I saw Miss Agatha slip down to talk to Peskett no sooner than he got out of sight this morning. And that’s not all. In five minutes down went the missus herself and talks to him. No wonder he gives hisself ans.
Mrs. Coggins shook her head more determinedly.
“It don’t do a girl any good to be carrying tales. No matter where she carries ’em. Now you wash up and I’ll go see poor Mr. Smith. Mark my words he won’t last long. Coggins was took that bad and he didn’t last the night.”
In the library Bull saw Mrs. Colton for the second time. Why Mrs. Royce should have called her scatter-brained he could not say. She obviously was not. If anything she was too reserved, too subdued. It never entered Inspector Bull’s mind that she might be grieving for her husband.
Bull of course was aware that he was a very bad judge of women. Nothing affected him as pleasantly as a beautiful one. In a completely detached way, of course. He regarded them much as he regarded the Dresden china shepherdesses he used to collect before he married one. They were to be admired from a distance. If you touched them, something always managed to come off—a hand, or a foot, or some of the brittle lace of their dresses. Or even their heads. Bull was a great believer in the dust on the butterfly’s wing. Which was pretty much the way he saw Mrs. Colton.
She was lovely. She had warm ivory skin and deep hazel eyes, crowned (he would have said) by sleek, smoothly waved ash-blonde hair drawn into a knot low on her neck. Her voice suited her very well, Bull thought several times.
“Mr. Smith is upstairs. He seems almost exhausted. I haven’t called a doctor, though. I thought rest would be enough for him. Will you go up now?”
“Yes. When did he come?”
“This afternoon about three. He was in a pitiful condition. He couldn’t speak coherently. I left him with Mrs. Coggins—she’s the cook—and after about an hour she came down and said he wanted to speak to me, so I went up. He told me about Gates’s not showing up. Then I called you.”
“That’s the boy?”
“Yes.”
Smith was lying on a white iron bed in what Bull gathered was a servant’s room on the third floor. He was the most fragile person the Inspector had ever seen. The thin transparent hands moved nervously with long twitching fingers over the eiderdown. Mrs. Colton went to his side and took one of the restless hands in hers. Bull felt that Death sat on the other side, holding the other hand. His was the stronger hold.
The old man opened his sunken eyes. His dry blue lips moved without a sound.
“Send for a doctor, Mrs. Colton,” Bull said quietly.
She turned frightened eyes on him and nodded. Bull took her place and put his fingers on the fading, fluttering pulse. He shook his head involuntarily. Sitting there alone he felt the thin thread of the old man’s life stop and flutter again. He thought of the spool on his mother’s sewing machine that he used to watch when he was a child. It whirled evenly as long as the spool was full. When the cotton was almost used, and the pull from the moving foot was too great for the reserve, it jumped and slipped and made uneven stitches. Bull watched the old man. Death on the other side was pulling too hard. There was no reserve.
“That’s like life,” Inspector Bull said seriously.
He heard people coming up the stairs.
It was Mrs. Colton, her step-daughter Agatha, and a doctor.
The doctor nodded to Bull, who stepped aside.
The two women stood at the foot of the bed. Bull found himself watching them instead of the old man. They were both young. One was tall and fair, calm yet radiant as crystal. The other was short and dark, tense, and as burning as some elemental flame.
The doctor straightened up and replaced his hypodermic needle in his bag. He watched his patient with a professional narrowing of the eye.
“Pretty far gone,” he said to Bull. “Mrs. Colton says you wanted him to talk.”
Bull nodded. The frail wraith on the bed stirred feebly and opened his eyes. The lips moved. Bull quickly bent over him. Screened in his great palm, directly in the old man’s view but invisible to the three other people, was a small gold key.
He could not tell if the dying man saw it.
The lips moved feebly again. “Gates . . . gone . . .”
The old man’s eyes suddenly dilated with fear. He was staring straight ahead of him, at the two women at the foot of the bed. Bull turned suddenly. All he saw was a flicker in two dark eyes, and a tightening of two full red lips. Agatha Colton smiled and put her hands behind her back.
The doctor felt the old man’s pulse.
“That’s all,” he said. “I gave him a stiff dose. Heart too weak. I’ll make out the certificate.”
Inspector Bull and the two women stood motionless. Everything seemed to have stopped in the room.
Suddenly Agatha Colton turned to her stepmother and said in a voice that was as deadly calm as sunshine over a volcano, “I’m sorry, Louise. I can’t stick it any longer. I’m going. Good-bye.”
She went out of the room and the three of them watched her without a word.
Bull turned to her stepmother. She was standing with one white hand resting helplessly on the iron bedstead. He had the queer feeling that something terrible had happened without knowing what it was or how to go about it to find out.
The doctor looked from one to the other of them, then back at the door through which Agatha Colton had walked; shrugged his shoulders, and prepared to fill out the death certificate.
CHAPTER TEN
Mrs. Colton turned to Inspector Bull.
“I think I’ll go to my room,” she said with an obvious effort to keep her voice steady.
“I should, Mrs. Colton,” remarked the doctor curtly. “I’ll leave you a bromide. I think you need some rest.”
It hadn’t occurred to Bull that Mrs. Colton and the doctor knew each other. He looked at him with more interest now that he did know.
“Are you the Coltons* physician?” Bull asked when Mrs. Colton had gone down.
“I attend Mrs. Colton. My name’s Bellamy. I’ve known her a good many years. Her brother and I were at school together.”
“Did you know Mr. Colton well?”
“I did not,” said Dr. Bellamy flatly. “I understood that he preferred to have Nelson attend the family and that he and Mrs. Colton had several arguments about my coming here.”
“Why?” said Inspector Bull politely.
“The usual thing, I suppose. He was a jealous fellow. That girl comes by her temper naturally.” “Miss Colton?”
“Yes. I don’t think she’s entirely to blame. I think she’s done everything she could to get along with her stepmother. But it’s been difficult. They’re about the same age—Agatha Colton is twenty-five and Mrs. Colton twenty-eight—and they’re both as temperamental as colts.”
“You mean they don’t get along?”
“Just what I’m trying to say. You saw the scene a few minutes ago, or I wouldn’t have mentioned it. In fact, somebody ought to take the girl in hand until this mess about her father is cleared up.”
Inspector Bull gave him a mildly inquisitive look.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “If you don’t know, let it go at that.”
“Mrs. Colton was unhappy with her husband?”
Again the doctor shrugged his heavy shoulders.
“Not more so than most married people I know.”
Bull disliked cynicism, was himself most happily married, and was annoyed.
“You’re not married yourself, then?”
“No. I see too much of other people’s affairs. However, Louise Colton has got on well enough. If Agatha had lived somewhere else I think she and Colton would have managed very nicely. But Agatha was opposed to her father’s marrying again. Her own mother had been dead only a year. I fancy old Colton wasn’t as suave at home as he was to his duchesses over the counter.”
“Was Agatha Colton jealous of her stepmother?”
“Jealous or resentful, one. They tried to hit it off. Agatha wanted to live by herself, take a flat somewhere, but the old fellow was opposed. The two agreed they’d be friendly enough if they didn’t have to live together. Colton was a pious, headstrong old ass. Said they ought to love one another.”
Bull noticed that the doctor spoke quite without bitterness. It seemed reasonable enough.
“Miss Colton looks as if she had a will of her own. Why didn’t she go anyway?”
“No money. Colton never gave her an allowance. She had to ask for every cent she got. As a matter of fact I think she was trying for a post somewhere.”
“Did she dislike her father?”
“No, indeed. They got on. At least before his second marriage. I think things are different now—or were.”
“What did she mean when she said she couldn’t stick it any longer, do you think?”
The doctor shrugged again as he took up his bag.
“Just what she said, I imagine. Unless she’s gone already she’s probably downstairs—why don’t you ask her?”
“Thanks,” said Inspector Bull. “I will.”
He heard voices in the library and tapped on the door.
Agatha Colton opened it. She was dressed for the street, in a short dark fur jacket and small black hat off her forehead. Her face was white and her eyes had a strained bright look in them.
“Come in, Inspector Bull,” she said, her voice tensely calm. “This is Mr. Field, my father’s solicitor.”
Bull saw a slender, middle-aged man with sandy hair.
“Inspector, I’m trying to persuade Miss Colton not to be precipitate here.”
The solicitor smiled at the girl in a half-serious, half-amused perturbation.
“Oh, I’m not being precipitate,” she cried. “I’ve stood it as long as I can. I can’t stand it any longer, I tell you.”
“Now, my dear. Think of your father. Think how it will look!”
Miss Colton’s eyes flashed.
“You make me sick, John Field. What do I care how it looks? Father’s dead and I’m going. Do you hear? Going!”
Mr. Field stepped backwards with a gesture of resignation, and bowed politely.
Inspector Bull said, “I quite understand your feeling, Miss Colton.”
The quiet authority in his voice brought her to instant attention.
“I’m quite sure you don’t,” she said sharply. “How could you? You can’t possibly.”
“Perhaps not, then, Miss Colton. But I do know this. If you leave now you’ll be making it harder for everybody, including yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
Mr. Field glanced up quickly from the papers he had been taking from his despatch case,
“I mean,” said Bull soberly, “that there are several points in connection with Mr. Colton’s death that have to be cleared up, and that haven’t been so far. And that until then we prefer to be in touch with . . . everybody.”
He was watching the girl closely. He saw the gradual dawning of horror in her dark eyes. She turned slowly to the solicitor, who stood by the table, his face blank with amazement.
“Then they did do it!” she cried suddenly, in a hard choked voice. “They did kill him!”
It was Bull’s turn to be horrified.
“Who did?” he said.
She looked at him wide-eyed for a moment.
“Nothing, Inspector. I didn’t mean anything.”
“Who do you think killed your father, Miss Colton?” Suddenly she laughed wildly.
“Who, indeed? Who do you think? Don’t be funny, Inspector. Oh, I’ll stay. Ring the bell please, somebody; tell the girl to unpack my bag.”
She sat down in a big leather chair by the fire and pulled off her hat. She was quite calm again, and stared into the fire, twirling her little hat round and round in her hands. Once she missed it and it fell on the floor. She made no move to pick it up. At last she stood up.
“I’m going upstairs. If you’d like to see Louise, Mr. Field, I’ll tell her you’re here . . . if the doctor’s left yet.”
“Thank you. I can wait if necessary.—A very difficult young woman, Inspector.”
Inspector Bull wiped his forehead with a fine tan handkerchief. “I’m beginning to believe it,” he said.
Mr. John Field was one of those men who while he was at Cambridge was felt a certainty to make a brilliant marriage and some day be Prime Minister. Unfortunately he was lazy. At forty he was still a solicitor with chambers in Gray’s Inn. However, he was a successful solicitor. He overcame his laziness enough to build up a fairly lucrative practice, largely for the reason that of the two evils, work and poverty, poverty was the worse.
George Colton was one of his best clients. His business was not large. It brought in only some few hundred pounds a year. But it took almost no time and practically no energy, and as such it was John Field’s favourite. Further, it was rumoured —and Mr. Colton had been pleased to confirm the rumours—that Mr. Field was interested in Agatha Colton. Mr. Colton was pleased. John Field certainly spent a good deal of time in the house in Cadogan-square, and if Agatha Colton did not seem to return his interest with as much ardour as her father would have liked, George Colton was not the man to let his daughter’s whims stand in the way of her own good.
Bull, of course, was entirely unaware of this. What he saw was an immaculately clad gentleman with slate-blue eyes and sandy hair that was neither as thick as Inspector Bull’s own tawny mane nor as thin as Agatha Colton said it was when she wished to annoy her father.